#readwise # 283 - Gun Violence in America  ## Metadata - Author: [[Sam Harris]] - Full Title: 283 - Gun Violence in America - URL: https://www.airr.io/episode/62958ee277fe2700118b412d - Transcript: ![[283 - Gun Violence in America Transcript.txt]] ## Blurb In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Graeme Wood about the problem of gun violence in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Graeme Wood is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and many other publications. He was the 2014–2015 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he teaches in the political science department at Yale University. He is the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. Website: https://www.theatlantic.com/author/graeme-wood/ Twitter: @gcaw ## Highlights SH: Why would anyone want to own a gun, right? [...] If you're going to take the end of this that many you know New York Times opinion columnists might take, it's just owning a gun is entirely fatuous because it just raises the risk that you're going to kill yourself or you're going to get killed with it by a member of your family who grows deranged, or it's going to get used against you. So your John Wayne fantasies of defending yourself and your family with a gun are irrational. There are many reasons to think that's just not true in one's own case, and to not fear that one is self-deceived, right? I mean yes, if you have a life of chaos, if you're, you know, in danger of being suicidally depressed, or if you or a member of your family seems to be, if you're running a meth lab, if you're hanging out with dangerous, dysfunctional people, yes, and adding guns to your life you you might well think is increasing the likelihood that you're going to be harmed by them. But if you are an entirely responsible, sane, and well trained person who understands almost to the level of a religious principle how important it is to store your gun safely, then it is true that the swimming pool in your yard is a greater risk to friends and family than the gun that is safely locked in your house. Responsible gun ownership in that case is a thing. The reason why it makes sense ethically is, **in my view, ==a world without guns is a world in which the strongest, most aggressive, most violent, most well trained and most numerous men always win==, right? ==That is what it is to live in a world where you don't have access to a weapon that gives you some kind of range in a physical altercation with a stranger who enters your house.== The big guy always win.** I just don't think anyone should be sentimental or nostalgic for that kind of world. ([Time 0:13:43](https://www.airr.io/quote/629b284dc33145d679c1fe88)) ^et06lm GW: **One thing that really changed my mind about guns was** a few years ago for the Atlantic, I profiled **a gun celebrity on YouTube named John Korea**. [...] In the past you know a person could live 100 years and not see more than half a dozen serious acts of violence. Now you can watch YouTube and there will be color commentary by extremely smart, clever people who have have watched thousands, 10s of thousands, in the case of John Korea and analyzed them. I think a lot of people who have no experience with guns have the immediate assumption that there's just no way that someone is going to defend himself with a legally acquired, known firearm, that the home invaders always have the drop on you, that bad guys end up using the guns against you, and indeed those things happen. But **you start watching these videos, which are curated by Korea and you start seeing it happens all the time that a self-defender uses a gun against a bad guy. So I think a lot of fantasies about guns, pro and con, are not surviving scrutiny.** Now that we can actually see more more instances, we could talk about weather in aggregate and it's hard to say [wether] owning a gun is more likely to save you or or harm you, and as you say, a lot of the answer to that is going to have to do with how responsibly you store it, how well trained you are in its use, and also whether you're a crazy person or not. ([Time 0:16:21](https://www.airr.io/quote/629b28d1c33145d679c20ee3)) SH: What I actually recommend? I mean, **the policies I would want to see enacted are more restrictive than anyone on the left is even arguing for and would be hopeless to try to implement in the current environment politically**. The short form of this is, I think **getting a gun should be the equivalent of getting a pilot's license**. I mean, I think you should have to be trained. You should have to be vetted. It should be highly nontrivial to get a gun. - Note: Sam references an essay he wrote on the topic called _[[The Riddle of The Gun]]_