Poe's "Lost Interview" with G. Gordon Liddy on "The 7 Myths of Gun Control"

WITH THE PAPERBACK EDITION of my book The Seven Myths of Gun Control due out in August 2003 from Crown Forum, I can't think of a more appropriate time to publish my "Lost Interview" with G. Gordon Liddy.

I call it "The Lost Interview" because most of my readers never heard it, never read it and never knew it took place. National radio host G. Gordon Liddy interviewed me on WTNT 570-AM about my then-newly-released book The Seven Myths of Gun Control. The interview aired live from 11:30 - 12 noon Eastern time on September 10, 2001 -- just a little short of 24 hours before the 9-11 attack.

As a New Yorker and as editor of FrontPageMagazine.com, I ended up having a whole lot to do on September 11 and precious little time to think about my talk with Liddy the day before. Both the book and the interview were largely forgotten in the ruckus that followed. Not until May 7, 2003 did I finally set aside time to transcribe the tape.

My interview with Liddy still reads as fresh as the day we aired it. And the issues it raises have only grown more urgent, as the War on Terror deepens. Without further ado, I present my full, unexpurgated "Lost Interview" with G. Gordon Liddy.

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Liddy: All right, we’re back here at the G. Gordon Liddy Show. And now my guest by telephone is Richard Poe. He has done the entire citizenry of the United States of America a huge favor. He has authored a splendid book called The Seven Myths of Gun Control. That’s published by Forum. It is a hardcover book. It is something that should be in every single home. The only other thing that’s more important in every single home would be a loaded gun.

Liddy: All right, now. I see you’ve got a foreword by my good friend David Horowitz, who has many a time appeared on the program and congratulations [unclear] magazine or what have you. Can, you know, the first thing that I would like you to address, I’m going to take things out of order, if you would, because I really looked into this and I want to discuss it with you and maybe between the two of us we can convince people of how bogus it is when the anti-gun people say that the Second Amendment applies only to the militia.

Liddy: National Guard. State Guard, or something like that, and that it is a collective right, not an individual right.

Liddy: Now, what, you know, I’m something of a fanatic about the English language. And I keep seeing the gun control people saying, well, the prefatory phrase, that’s their language, the prefatory phrase, which is that a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, that prefatory phrase affects the second, and that what that does is take it out of the personal right situation and makes it some sort of a collective right now. In the first place, it is not a prefatory phrase. If you look at those words, they constitute a present participle in the English language, a present participle, which simply states a fact. In no way does it modify in any way or affect in any way the sentence that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. And they’re getting away with murder just because so many people these days don’t understand sixth grade English. That’s a present participle. It doesn’t modify that at all.

Poe: Well, that’s absolutely true, Gordon, and, but actually despite that fact, the exact wording of the Second Amendment isn’t really even the most important issue, in terms of interpreting our gun rights in America, because the Second Amendment, first of all, the entire Bill of Rights was never intended to be a list of all the rights to which we are entitled. In other words…

Liddy: It simply says that all the other rights, and which clearly implies that there are others, are reserved to the states or the people.

Poe: Yes, and in fact, there was a strong faction among the anti-Federalists at the time that the Bill of Rights was being drafted which, among the Federalists, I’m sorry, who opposed the drafting of a Bill of Rights at all, because they said that, if we list the number of, if we enumerate rights that are said to be basic to our citizenry, then someday, at some point in the future, some sophist is going to come along and say, well, let’s start taking rights away from people by simply arguing that if it’s not written on this piece of paper, you can’t have it. This was a major debate at the time that the Bill of Rights was drafted, whether it was actually dangerous to write them down, since people would later assume that our rights would be limited by what was on that page.

Liddy: Originally, the Federalists said look, we have made it very very clear in this Constitution that the only powers being given to this new federal government are those specifically enumerated and if it’s not, if the power isn’t right here, they don’t have it.

Poe: Yes, and amazingly, James Madison himself, who was the author of the Bill of Rights, he was finally essentially pressured into writing them, he among others stated that the reason they weren’t really necessary is because the entire nation was armed and that if any government in the future tried to create a tyranny, that the entire armed force of the people, by which he meant the militia, would rise up against them. There are innumerable quotations.

You know, I’m glad you raised this point, Gordon, because it’s perhaps the most important point for Americans to understand right now, because this year, more than at any other time in our history, the anti-gun faction has really taken off its mask and showed its fangs.

Up till now, they always pretended that they just wanted a little licensing, a little regulation, a little of this, a little of that. The anti-gun people were always the first to declare that we had no intention of taking away your right to bear arms. This year, they suddenly changed their tune, a one-hundred-eighty-degree about-face. When John Ashcroft was up for nomination, they had all these anti-gun people testifying against him, accusing him of guess what? Supporting the Constitution. Accusing him of actually believing that Americans had a right to keep and bear arms. Now this has never happened before, and it’s not, of course, it’s not being adequately covered by the mainstream media. This is a major event that’s occurring. The anti-gun people have come out in the open, they’ve come out of the closet, and they’ve said, guess what? All those years that we’ve been telling you we don’t want to take your guns away, we were lying.

Liddy: Absolutely, and for the sake of our listeners, Mr. Poe, what precipitated this is there’s a case coming up through the federal system…

Liddy: Out of Texas, in which a United States district court judge in Texas gave a correct decision, having to do with the Second Amendment, in effect, it is an individual right and the Clinton Administration had taken an opposing view. They had said there is no individual right, and that this is all, you know, the National Guard and so forth, and John Ashcroft, in response to an inquiry from the National Rifle Association, wrote a letter saying, no, this is the Constitution and of course it’s very very plain. One of the things that American people -- I wish were a little better educated in the English language -- would understand. The Second Amendment doesn’t give you a right. What it says, you know, the people who authored these things were masters of the English language and they said shall not be infringed.

Liddy: That clearly means this is a God-given right that all free men everywhere , throughout history have had, because they had the moral obligations to defend themselves and their families and their country from tyranny, they always had that right. And the Second Amendment doesn’t give you that. It simply says we will not infringe it. We’re not going to screw around with that right.

Poe: Yes, and further, in Constitutional law, whenever there’s any kind of dispute, as there often are, about what did the Framers really mean in this or that passage, well, the way that that’s ordinarily dealt with is you go back to the original writings of the Framers. You look at the letters they wrote, the newspaper articles, the pamphlets, the debates of the time, to find out what was actually meant at that moment, over two centuries ago, when those words were written. This is a part of the ordinary procedure in studying Constitutional law. Now there’s a very noteworthy Constitutional scholar named Steve Halbrook who wrote a book called That Every Man Be Armed, and that book is, probably, to my knowledge, the only comprehensive study of how the Second Amendment came to be.

Liddy: That is a quotation, a partial quotation from "The object, sir, is that every man be armed."

Poe: Yes, from Patrick Henry. And what Halbrook did, he did a complete scholarly analysis. He read every word that was written at that time, every contemporary document, every newspaper, every letter, every scrap of writing from the Framers of the Constitution and from the citizens who were debating this issue at the time. There were, you read that book and you read the citations and the footnotes, there is absolutely no question, this is not even a debatable issue, that people at that time understood that the Second Amendment was meant to ensure a right for every man to bear arms.

Poe: A man named Tenche Cox who was a very good friend of James Madison, who wrote the Second Amendment, who wrote the entire Bill of Rights, Tenche Cox was a newspaper editor who wrote a whole explanation of the Bill of Rights, in order to explain it to the people. It was widely reprinted all over the country, so that the people could see and understand what was being proposed and what was its purpose. Tenche Cox clearly stated that the purpose of the Second Amendment, its explicit and specific purpose, was to ensure that the people would always be armed, in case they should need to rise against a tyrannical government.

Liddy: Absolutely. Well, our sponsors are going to rise against tyrannical me if we don’t take a quick break here, Mr. Poe. We’re going to take a break for a few minutes, and then we will be back with more from Richard Poe, author of The Seven Myths of Gun Control, published by Forum, a book that belongs in every American home!

Liddy: My special guest is Richard Poe, author of the splendid book, The Seven Myths of Gun Control, a book that ought to be in every single American home. And you, it’s published by Forum. You can find it of course in all major book chains. You can also get it at Amazon.com and Wednesday, when my new Web site goes on, gets launched, at the GGordonLiddyShow.com, you’ll be able to get it through there too. Now Mr. Poe, I’m a few years older than you are, and one of the things I wanted to tell you is that I was fifteen when the Second World War ended, and all my older friends came marching back home.

Liddy: They came back with Lugers, P35 Brownings, Walther P38s, Schmeisser submachine guns, everything in the world, and nobody said boo.

Liddy: They just brought them all in. And they didn’t go around and murder anybody, shot anybody or do anything like that. And, when I was going to school in those days, I had access to a gun. I had my own gun, at age 13. We never had any school shootings. I mean, I lived in a town where what we would do after school was go down and shoot crows or what, you know, squirrels and things of that sort, with .22 caliber rifles. Everybody had a gun. Nobody, it never occurred to anybody to shoot anybody in school. You went to Boy Scout camp. They had a rifle team. The schools all had rifle teams. None of that nonsense was going on.

Liddy: Because we were all very very familiar with firearms and we respected them and knew them. I had five children. By the time they were 13, all five of them, including two girls, were very familiar with and were good shots with handguns and long guns and shotguns and had even had familiarization [unclear] with [unclear] fully automatic weapons.

Liddy: And as a result, when two of my three boys went into the Marine Corps at the same time, and they went out on the range for the first time and they both shot double expert the same day and the sergeant said, "How did you do that?" And they just said hey, our name is Liddy. And he said, "Well that explains it," you know. And the third one, not to think that there’s anything wrong with the third one, the third one’s a Navy Seal, so you get the picture. These guys didn’t go out and shoot anybody in school, and they had access to loaded guns all over the house.

Liddy: All over the house we had loaded guns. All throughout their youth. Ah, Jeez…

Poe: Well, Gordon, you know, what you’re talking about is really, in one sense, the most fundamental point that I tried to make in my book, in The Seven Myths of Gun Control, is the point that our culture is changing, and it’s not changing on its own. It’s, a change is being forced on us. We were, at one time, not so very long ago, a warrior culture, a nation of warriors, and children were raised to be warriors by their parents.

Poe: And you can’t raise a nation of warriors if you have a nation of soccer moms whose only concern is that everybody be safe from all harm and all risk. What you’re going to raise then is a nation of non-warriors, and what’s going to happen is, you know the thing is…

Liddy: We’ll get our clocks cleaned and our asses waxed in the next real war we’re in.

Poe: Exactly, and one thing that’s happening, of course, people today are now being told, well, we won’t have any wars because the UN is going to rule the world and take care of everything and we’ll only have peace. I don’t think that’s even worth talking about. People between every major war have always thought that there weren’t going to be any more wars or it wasn’t going to happen here, or it wasn’t going to happen to them. This is the ostrich-head-in-the-sand syndrome that has always led to the most terrible catastrophes in history and it’s something that Americans have uniquely been immune from, more than other places. We have had this strong sense of preparedness that we inherited from our Founding Fathers, to be prepared against all threats, not only external but internal…

Liddy: Yeah, you know, this risk-averse thing, you just touched on a raw nerve for me, this risk-averse business. If you watch, go to the History Channel or something like that, and watch these documentaries about the Second World War. Watch stuff about the air war. They’re coming in with P-47 Thunderbolts. They are so low that they’re coming in below the level of the locomotives that they’re blowing up and when they blow them up, there’s pieces of locomotive flying at the plane and all the rest of it. They’re underneath the flak towers and so on, and that’s how they did the job back then. And believe me, it was risky. Well, did you see what they were trying to do in Bosnia? Take out tanks from three miles high!

Poe: Yes, and this is what’s happening to our culture, and it doesn’t just show, you know, war is an extraordinary event and most people can’t really relate to it if it’s not happening to them. But, you know, there’s a war in the streets everyday. There’s the war of just staying alive, the war of survival.

The one thing that really gets me with these anti-gun people is how they say, well, we don’t need the Second Amendment anymore, we don’t need guns anymore. It was dangerous on the frontier. There were Indians. There were bandits, and so forth and so on. Well, actually, scholars have studied violence on the Western frontier. Several different scholars have published interesting books and papers on this subject that show that the risk of running into violence today on a city street in America is far far greater than it was in Dodge City or Abilene or any of those wide-open cattle towns that we see in the movies. Actually, crime and especially murder was quite low, and one thing that virtually never ever happened was violence against respectable women and children…

Poe: They were simply left alone by the most evil, dissolute characters that you’d see on those Western streets. They had a respect for respectable people. They left them alone. Women did not get raped or robbed. Houses did not get broken in on. And part of the reason that they had that respect, maybe the main reason, was because they knew that those respectable people had guns and would kill them and moreover, if a respectable person killed a criminal, he wasn’t, the respectable person wasn’t going to go to jail, which is what happens all too often nowadays.

Liddy: You’ve got, you’ve got in your book, The Seven Myths of Gun Control, an absolutely horrifying tale. It starts right out with it, about the Carpenter family, on 23 August 2000, what happened to those children, and I want you to recount that because what it showed is that the laws of the state of California that were meant to protect children actually led to their deaths and…

Liddy: …when this was reported, the media barons kept it away from the American people. Tell us about that.

Poe: Yes, well, it’s a big story that, in its own way, is happening all over America. Merced, California was a little Western town. This was not one of your New Age California towns. These were people of pioneer stock. They owned guns…

Poe: Yeah, they used guns. This was, the Carpenter family had five children. All five of those children, from a very early age, had used guns. Their father was a hunter. He had guns in the house. He particularly had, for home protection, a .357 Magnum which he kept in his bedroom, and all the children knew it and they knew where it was. The only problem is that California’s safe storage laws said that it had to be kept out of the reach of the children.

Poe: Yes. So he kept it unloaded, high up on a closet shelf. And one day, the fourteen-year-old girl Jessica Carpenter was left in charge to babysit her brother and her sisters, and she, by the way, had a hunter’s safety certificate, she was an excellent shot, she came, she woke up, she came out of her bedroom to find that there was a madman inside the house, with a pitchfork, and the details are just so horrifying, he just went on a rampage, this man. He ended up killing two of the children, seriously wounding, goring one of the girls, a thirteen-year-old girl. These, two of the girls, Jessica and Ashley, the one who was wounded, went to a neighbor’s house and this neighbor also had a gun, and they begged him to get his gun and stop this man. He wouldn’t do it. He said here’s my phone. Call 9-11.

And what is really interesting about this case, finally the police came, of course, and they killed the guy after he had murdered two of the children, but the town itself was really outraged by this thing. This was a typical American town and, like all typical American towns today, this town lived in fear of the government. People who had guns, but they no longer knew what was legal, what wasn’t legal, the laws were constantly changing, people were beginning to turn in their guns, going into gun shops and saying I want to sell this, I don’t want it around, because I don’t want to end up in jail for some law that I never even knew existed. That’s what was happening in this town, and that’s why those children died, and it’s happening all over America.

Liddy: It was, you know, never reported, that. Mr. Poe, we could go on and on and on. You’ve got a marvelous book here, The Seven Myths of Gun Control, and you just demolished them and I just want every single American citizen to get a copy of this book, The Seven Myths of Gun Control by Richard Poe, published by Forum. Thank you, sir.

Great post.

Interviews aired over the weekend with Senator Feinstein on the new AWB language. Folks, they're definitely trying to build a safe society at the expense of homeland defense. There's not a word about defending our freedoms in these TV "balanced reports." It's all about the children. She sounds so convincing, and the reporters make it all too clear that the debate is only about saving policemen.

They've forgotten that it's not that simple. Safety in any society begins with national security. National security ends with a well-trained, armed public.

Of course, everything said in this interview and in the book are correct. The problem would not be so bad if the view that guns are evil totems was limited to the very shrill lying scum-bags at VPC and the rest of the Brady Boobs; the idea that society will be safer (and, presumably, the citizenry will be "freer") if all guns are outlawed is a bed-rock part of the Democratic Party platform.

It is part of every left-wing special interest group, some of whom are doing their members a big disservice, like NOW and AARP, and GLAD (except for the Pink Pistols)whose membership roles include those who are some of the main victims of armed thugs.

It is an entrenched part of the American public education system - guns are simply "bad" and there seems to be no way to change this attitude. The biggest part of the problem of re-educating the public on this most basic of rights is the main stream press. The people who control the dissemination of so-called "news" are 90% left-wingers who push the party line - everyday - through thousands of news outlets including every major television, radio and newspaper venue throughout the country.

These news conglomerates don't just "report" news - they hope to shape public opinion in such a way as to instill the idea that "socialism is good for us." If the results of the presidential election of 2000 was any indication, it won't be long before they have their way. We are perilously close to having a majority of voters decide that guns should be outlawed entirely.

Congress and the many state legislatures, even those that are not yet completely given over to neo-Marixism (unlike California and Massachusetts, states that are lost in this fight), succumb to this phoney so-called "public opinion" that firearms are BAAAAD. Every year they continue to pass myraid unconstitutional laws that erode the RKBA; and even when we get guys like G. W. Bush and AG Ashcroft, we don't see any real action to reverse the tide of anti-gun, anti-freedom legislation.

All we get are some "pretty words" about how the 2nd refers to an individual right to keep and bear. Yet, here are these same guys supporting the extension of the '94 rotten so-called AW ban. So the RAT party works for an outright total ban/confiscation, and the Repubo Party merely trys to hold the line. That is a recipe for disaster with respect to the RKBA. So we lose the right in 50 years instead of 20. And there does not seem to be a "silver lining".

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