Tucker: They are going to try to take your guns away
WARNING—Graphic footage: Fox News host voices his concerns over countries disarming their citizens on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
We have not brought you enough on this story that you may know from its outlines. For the past two months, 25 million people in Shanghai, China, one of the biggest cities in the world, have been trapped inside their homes.
On the basis of what it claims is a COVID risk, but it's clearly purely political, the Chinese government has locked them in – can't get out. Anyone suspected of being sick has been shipped to a squalid quarantine camp, sometimes without running water, and then to make the humiliation complete, police collected household pets, tore them from their owner's hands, and beat them to death in the streets, claiming that dogs and cats somehow spread disease.
Anyone who complained about this got a very clear answer from the government, which was broadcast at full volume from drones circling overhead. They said, "Control your soul's desire for freedom." So, people did. They had no choice. That's what life is like in an authoritarian society and not just in China, also in New Zealand. Less than a year ago, the left-wing New Zealand government shut down the entire country over a single COVID case. "Don't talk to your neighbors," commanded the prime minister. "Keep to your bubbles."
In neighboring Australia, they did pretty much the same thing. Police in Australia beat a man for daring to have a cigarette outside his own apartment. Now, that may all seem horrifying to you, but public health authorities here loved it. They looked on in envy. Unfortunately, as Tony Fauci recently explained to me, NBC, "You'd never be able to implement measures like that here in the United States," and that's true. You'd hope. But why couldn't you? Why couldn't you do that here?
Well, Tony Fauci didn't say it out loud, but if you think about it for a minute, it's pretty obvious. What do all those other countries have in common: China, New Zealand, Australia? Different populations, different languages, different forms of government, but all of them have disarmed their populations. In those countries, ordinary people are defenseless and the government knows it.
China, of course, was the first to confiscate privately held firearms. It happened more than 50 years ago. Political power grows from the barrel of a gun, Chairman Mao famously observed, and he wanted all of that power for himself, so he got it. In 1996, Australia followed after a mass shooting committed by a mentally disabled man. Sound familiar? The Australian government, in the aftermath of that, declared that self-defense was no longer a legitimate reason to own a firearm and the government confiscated hundreds of thousands of guns from law-abiding citizens. That's what happened.
In 2019, after yet another mass shooting by a crazy person, neighboring New Zealand did pretty much the same thing. So now in all three of those countries, China, Australia and New Zealand, firearms now registered and licensed by the government and permitted only for hunting and sports shooting. Citizens have been disarmed.
Last week's mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, occurred more than 2,000 miles from Canada. You wouldn't think it was connected in any way to Canada, but that country's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, saw an opening to repeat what is now a highly familiar script. On Monday, Trudeau announced that because a deranged teenager in the U.S. had committed an act of violence, Canadians would no longer be allowed to defend themselves. Watch.
Justin Trudeau, Canada's prime minister, speaks during a news conference in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, on Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022. (David Kawai/Bloomberg)
JUSTIN TRUDEAU: We recognize that the vast majority of gun owners use them safely and in accordance with the law, but other than using firearms for sports shooting and hunting, there is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives.
"There's no reason that anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives." That's the word from the Botoxed dictator to the north. That means anyone in Canada apart from Justin Trudeau because guns, it turns out, are a huge part of Justin Trudeau's everyday life. Much more than your life. At all times, Justin Trudeau is surrounded by firearms, automatic rifles, extended magazines, what we call weapons of war and Justin Trudeau always will be surrounded by weapons of war. Even if he succeeds in confiscating every last privately held firearm in the nation of Canada, Justin Trudeau will never disarm his own bodyguards.
Why? Because he understands perfectly well that guns are the key to his power. So actually, in one of those ironies we've become very familiar with recently, no one loves guns more than Justin Trudeau. In the rest of Canada, in point of fact, guns aren't much of an issue. There were just 16 homicides in the million-person city of Ottawa over all of last year, and half of those involve knives and fists, not guns. One of them is a self-defense case.
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So, guns are not killing a lot of Canadians. What is killing a lot of Canadians are drug lords. More than 5,000 Canadians died last year from opioids alone, mostly fentanyl. How is Justin Trudeau responding to this? Well, days ago, he announced that he is legalizing fentanyl along with cocaine and methamphetamine in Canada's third largest providence, British Columbia.
This is a place, this is a province, where more than 165 people died last month from drug ODs. By comparison, in 2020, in the entire nation of Canada, 23 people died per month in acts involving a firearm. So why, if you were concerned about public health, would you ban firearms, but legalize fentanyl? Fentanyl is what people are dying from, not guns. How does that make sense? Well, it only makes sense if your goal is to keep the population weak and vulnerable, even if it kills them and that would explain why Trudeau is not stopping with British Columbia. He also has said he's working with Toronto and Edmonton to legalize fentanyl there as well.
Meanwhile, at the same time, also under the guise of public health, Trudeau has just announced an indefinite extension of his country's travel ban for millions of Canadian citizens, just like in China, just like in Cuba. So, if you haven't taken Justin Trudeau's totally ineffective yet still mandatory COVID vax, you can't leave your own country. You also can't travel internally by plane or train. This is not a public health measure, of course. It's a show of force from a tyrant. But if you don't like it tough, there's nothing you can do. Why? Because you've been disarmed.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a press conference on the airline industry in Montreal, Quebec on July 15, 2021. (Photo by ANDREJ IVANOV/AFP via Getty Images)
TRUDEAU: It will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada and we will require the permanent alteration of long gun magazines so they can never hold more than five rounds.
You can have all the fentanyl you want, but you can't defend yourself. And it's not just gun confiscation, as you heard, it's magazine confiscation and as always, our authorities, mostly in the Democratic Party, are taking very close notes when they watch Justin Trudeau speak. Joe Biden just announced that 9 mm ammunition is, "high caliber," which makes anyone who understands guns laugh, and should therefore be banned. Nine-millimeter, the single most common pistol round sold in the United States by far should be banned, says Joe Biden.
In New York, the unelected governor, Kathy Hochul, just announced legislation to, "eliminate the grandfathering of large-capacity ammunition feeding devices." That means your legal magazine is now illegal. Possessing it is now a crime. It wasn't yesterday. It is today. That's the word from the unelected governor of New York, because that's democracy. She also plans to create a licensing requirement for all semiautomatic weapons. That's not just the scary-looking ones you see on TV. That's all semiautomatic weapons, including your deer rifle.
While they disarm you, as in Canada, our leaders are busy decriminalizing serious crimes, ones that actually hurt you. For example, according to the Seattle Times, police in Seattle are no longer investigating rape. Yes, they are "no longer assigning detectives this new year, to cases with adult victims." That's rape victims. They'll have to do without.
If any of the people in charge wanted this to be a safer country, they wouldn't have caused the current crime wave in the first place. They would not have defunded police. They wouldn't be encouraging open-air drug markets in our cities. They wouldn't be sending crack pipes to addicts. But they're not worried about the public health at all. What they're worried about is public resistance to their policies. Disarming the population ends that resistance.
They're very concerned because they know they rule illegitimately that the population will rise up. That probably has not occurred to you. It's definitely occurred to them, and it's occurred to the corporate media they control, whose job it is to push their power grabs, and they would very much like a Canada/China-style gun ban in this country. Watch them salivate.
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TRUDEAU: We need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse.
CHRIS HAYES: Something pretty striking about that phrase he used right, "south of the border" to describe us, the United States. It's a phrase you hear so often this country by people who are kind of denigrating Mexico as a supposedly lawless land of, you know, ultraviolence. That's how they see us.
BRYNN GINGRAS, CNN REPORTER: Trudeau says, listen, he understands, most gun owners use their guns safely, but there's really no need, like many people have been talking about, for assault style weapons in their country.
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: I want to consider how a real democracy actually handles gun issues and changes to gun laws. Consider what Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had to say about guns in Canada.
Canada looks down on America, informs the Rachel Maddow impersonators on MSNBC. Notice they used to brag about the Canadian health care system. "It's so great. Why don't we emulate it?" You ever heard that recently. Why is that? Because Canadians fly here for serious operations and the truth is, in Canada, as in the United States, the people you just saw on television, the people who are formulating these restrictions, these gun grabs, these violations of your constitutional rights, will never, under any circumstances, give up their own weapons of war.
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They just want to make it harder for you to defend yourself. Now, as is the case with all of these laws, from cigarette taxes to gun laws, the poor get hurt the most. Charlie LeDuff and Steve Neavling, two journalists in Michigan, found that police response times in poor neighborhoods are about twice as long as they are in rich neighborhoods.
Oh, so if anyone needs the power to defend himself, it's people who live in poor neighborhoods and those happen to be the same people the Democratic Party claims to care about, but they don't seem to actually care and that's why Beto O'Rourke is now talking again about seizing a AR-15s from the homes of law-abiding people. Here he is.
BETO O'ROURKE: Not only should no one be able to purchase an AR-15 or an AK-47 because they're designed to kill humans and that high impact, high velocity round, will just tear up everything inside. You'll bleed out before we can get you back to life, but I don't think that the people who have them right now in civilian use should be able to keep them.
"Shouldn't be able to keep them." Beto O'Rourke is deciding what rights you should have. Beto O'Rourke, who's actually never had a job ever, who lives on inherited money, who's not even very smart, is telling you what the parameters of your God-given rights enshrined in our Constitution ought to be. I don't think you should have that right. Buzz off, pal.
Now, you'd think Republican office holders exist to push back against this and to defend the Bill of Rights. Isn't that their job? Is not what you voted for them? Oh, no. They're playing along just to show they care.
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So, this weekend, one of the weakest of them all, really an embarrassment to the state of Arkansas, the governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, noted ally to the trans community, said he's open to more restrictions on legal rifles. Watch Asa Hutchinson.
JOHN BERMAN, CNN: What's the one area, and I'm talking about guns here, not as much as schools, what's the one area on gun safety where you think there could be common ground?
GOV. ASA HUTCHINSON: Well, first of all, I think you've got to be able to talk about the AR-15 style weapons and whether that's an 18 or 21 age. You have to at least have a conversation about that.
So, you got to wonder, since Asa Hutchinson's thinking to himself, "How do I impress the CNN anchor? I'm not some troglodyte from Conway, Arkansas. I get what I need to do. I'm a responsible adult. I've been to the Aspen Institute. I'd go to Davos if they invited me." But you've got to wonder how many of his constituents agree with him.
Oh, probably about zero. He doesn't care. So, you can see where this is moving. They're going to try and take your guns away. What will happen when they do? Will it be a safer country? Have they been good at disarming criminals? No. It turns out you will be completely dependent upon them for your safety. What will that look like? Well, we could ask the woman who called the police from the grocery store in Buffalo two weeks ago when a lunatic walked in and started murdering people. She called 911. And what happened? The 911 operator hung up on her.
Or we could ask the parents of those kids in Uvalde. The police just showed up and stood outside. Watch.
MOTHER 1: Look at that poor little kid, that poor baby.
MOTHER 2: You're scared to get shot? I'll go in without a gun.
TEACHER: We're trying to get them out. I don't understand.
So,it's not an attack on police. We defend the police and we'll continue to do that, including the ones in Uvalde. No doubt they're mostly good and decent and patriotic people, but the truth about all police, about all government workers, about everyone outside your family is they're never going to care about your family as much as you do because it's your family, not theirs.
You will lay down your life to defend your children. Why would they? They're not their children. It's not an attack. It's just an obvious observation and a lot of times the truth is, since we've defunded the police across the country, they don't even show up because there aren't enough of them to show up. So, where there were, where were the police, by the way, when this woman got stabbed in broad daylight in New York City? Look at this footage. It's from May 22 in Brownsville, Brooklyn. There were no cops there. The guy just walked up and stabbed her.
These kind of attacks happen a lot and they are particularly common in the very cities that have disarmed law-abiding gun owners. The footage you're seeing now is from the Bronx in March. Thugs robbed a young woman at gunpoint, then turned the gun at her three-year-old boy's head. The woman was taking her son, who has autism, to pre-K. Where were the police? Well, they weren't there. They've been defunded, but if they haven't been defunded, they can't be everywhere. If you want to defend yourself, you're going to have to do it yourself. That's just the truth.
By contrast, a woman in Charleston stopped a mass shooter the other day. She didn't call the police. He showed up with an AR-15 and said he's going to kill everybody. You know what she did? She shot him to death.
REPORTER: Police say an AR-15 style rifle showed up to a party. This video shows the scene from stories above. It was captured by a cell phone and sent to Eyewitness News. The man with the rifle was later identified by police as Dennis Butler. Court documents reveal he's been convicted of two felonies, which include child neglect and child abuse. Charges such as those make it illegal for him to have a gun or ammo, but Wednesday night, he allegedly fired into a crowd here at Renaissance Circle. Charleston police say he was shot and killed by a woman that was licensed to carry a gun.
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Oh. So, what's the headline from that story? He was not allowed to be in possession of a gun. It was against the law for him to have a gun. But it looks like gun laws did nothing to deter the lunatic with the rifle when he started shooting strangers and neither did the police because they weren't there and no police officer could get there in time to save the lives of the people present.
The only reason they're still alive is because a woman in the crowd, a citizen, had a gun, and she used it to defend herself and the rest of the people there. Why is she not a hero? The truth is, any government that tries to make you more dependent, any government that tries to make you less self-sufficient, is by definition a malicious government. They are not on your side. They're trying to hurt you.
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