Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is David Kopel, research director of the Independence Institute, adjunct professor of advanced constitutional law at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law, an associate policy analyst at the Cato Institute, his the author of 14 books and a recognized expert on firearms policy. So we're talking about guns today and I guess I'll start by asking why allow people to have guns at all.  But aren't we past that as a civilization beyond the point of needing guns? Well actually we are now in the golden age. The goldenness of golden age is in terms of gun density in this country. Since 1948 the United States had about one gun per three people and now that has increased till we have slightly more guns than people. Where are all these guns? I don't own a gun. Most people I know I don't think own guns. Are they just stockpiled somewhere? Well part of it is people are not always out of the closet about their gun ownership. Somebody in New York City might say that same thing and that's sort of like somebody in say Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1952 saying, well I don't know any homosexuals.  And so certainly in the northeast corridor one of the more regressive zones in terms of protecting second amendment rights, people may be shyer about admitting their gun ownership casually. And is that because it seems like gun owners have been demonized a lot in that way? Well they certainly are by some in the press and the anti-gun groups, the Michael Bloomberg groups, the groups like the originally called handgun controls now called the Brady Campaign, sometimes say that they respect gun owners or that they like the second amendment just as much as everybody else but they also do a lot of demonization and fear.  So let's go back to Aaron's first question. Why do we even allow, first of all, why do we allow it? And then secondly, should we allow it? Well the premise of the second amendment and of most of the Bill of Rights is that's not something that any legitimate government has the power to forbid. So they would be like asking why do we allow the free exercise of religion? And we certainly see cases where the free exercise of religion is abused where somebody who has sort of a deceptive false charisma lures people in and gets them into a bad situation in an abusive church, for example. But the Declaration of Independence says that the reason we have governments in the first place is to protect pre-existing, fundamental, inalienable human rights which come from the crater and not from the government. So the government may grant you the right to have a, let's say, a driver's license but the government doesn't grant you the right of freedom of religion or the right of self-defense or the second amendment right to arms or lots of other rights which are recognized and protected by the Constitution but not created by it. It is wise that the United States follows this policy of protecting human rights rather than trying to suppress them because the evidence, I think, shows when carefully examined that guns in the right hands enhance public safety and certainly guns in the wrong hands harm public safety. So the sensible policies are the ones that say for that vast majority of the law-abiding public, they should be able to choose to have a firearm if they want for self-protection and we can also have fair and reasonable laws which say that people who have proven that they are not responsible enough to own firearms, who have been convicted of a violent crime, cannot have firearms. How do we draw that line between right and wrong? Because a lot of the people arguing for stricter gun control are not arguing for banning guns entirely. They just want more control over who gets them. They want to more clearly define or shrink the category of the people who are considered the right people to have guns so things like mental health and whatever else.  Well, the gun prohibition lobbies have been trying to shrink the category of people who can and they do as much shrinkage on the margins as they can accomplish at any given time. Sometimes they make legitimate arguments and sometimes those arguments have already been made and accepted and properly implemented but not enforced. So, for example, you may have situations where somebody has been adjudicated, mentally ill and put it in an institution to help them for say half a year. That person by federal law since 1968 hasn't been allowed to own a gun but often the records don't get transmitted to the state and national systems that conduct background checks. And also along with that, that's an example of something where if a person was institutionalized when they were 25, maybe by the time they're 45, their mental health problems have gone and they ought to be allowed to own a firearm again. And unfortunately at the federal level there's no procedure to restore the person's rights. California is actually on the more progressive, positive side of this because they do have a procedure where after about five years a person who had a mental health adjudication can at least start a process to have his case reviewed. It seems like then the presumption should be that you can own a weapon that's defensible from the government's side as opposed to some people who would like you to have to prove to the government you're allowed to own a weapon. The other side is a better because it's a natural right, correct? Exactly. It's not a privilege that's granted by the government subject to conditions but it is a right and which is not to say that in the modern United States it's impossible for there to be any kind of a process to go through it on the way to exercising that right as long as that process is fair and accurate and expeditious. So I think the vast majority of people would say, well, when you go into a store to buy a gun and under the national criminal instant background check system that we've had set up in this country since 1998, the gun dealer contacts a state point of contact of the state police or the FBI and you can do a computerized records check on that individual quite quickly within a matter of seconds when the system is working properly and that additional time which might be no longer than the time it takes to process the credit card, people would I think accurately say that doesn't violate the Second Amendment right even though you come in having the presumption of the exercise of the right this step along the way is not an infringement of that. Let me ask about this gun ownership as a right question because earlier you compared it to First Amendment to religious practice, a right to religious practice, a right to religious expression and it seems like we can distinguish those in some way. They're not quite the same because we tend to think of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion as these really important parts of expressing who we are, of being the kind of people we want to be, of personal autonomy that seems to go much deeper than gun ownership. We don't tend to think of gun ownership as something as central to our sense of selves as our religious faith or our beliefs. Or perhaps even to add on to that, some people might grant that there's a right to self-defense in the sense of someone jumps on top of you and starts pummeling you, you can fight back. But how do you get from a right to self-defense to the right to own an assault weapon? There's a bridge there, right? And maybe an assault weapon is not as important as religion. Well, the right of self-defense was in the view of the classical philosophers. John Locke, Grodius, Puffendorf and many, many others, the most fundamental of all rights. It's the right to the integrity of your body. Being able to go to the church of your choice is a very important part of one's self or to choose not to go to any church.  And likewise, the right not to be raped is a core right of individual autonomy, integrity and choice. So self-defense almost necessarily has to be the most fundamental right of all because if you don't have that, then it's impossible to exercise any of the other rights. Isn't this, though, what we have police for? I mean, this is the social contracts theory, we tell, right? We lived in a state of nature where everyone had to defend themselves from roving bans and marauders. But then we banded together and created this government so that we could then have the government protect our rights instead of us each having to do it for ourselves. So we've got cops to protect us from the mobs and the rapists. Well, and sometimes they do and it's great and I think police officers, sheriff's deputies and our law enforcement system in the country has a huge number of really hardworking good citizens who do their best to protect people. But they're not around all the time. You know, when somebody's burglarizing your house and coming in not just to take your iPad but to assault you, that's fine. You can call the police on the phone and they may come as fast as they possibly can. But the data we have from 911 call centers and cities all over the country for what they call their priority one calls, life is in danger, that level, their highest level. Response times on the average are in the best and most ideal cities, five or six minutes, up to 12 or 15 minutes in some other cities. So you have that time when you're the first responder. You know, that's just a fundamental fact of responsibility. You know, the reason we, I didn't go to medical school. I, we have doctors as we have police officers, people in society who are specialized and help us and I wouldn't, I'd much rather pay a doctor to diagnose me and tell me what medicine to take in some situations than I would myself. But likewise with your healthcare, you're also your own first responder. If you get sick in the middle of the night, you may have to take care of yourself immediately to stay alive long enough to get to the hospital in some kind of emergency. Whatever the situation is, the responsible adult has to be the first responder for himself and herself and the people in her care like children and family just by necessity. We don't have one police officer per person, you know. That's an interesting analogy. You should be able to tie a tourniquet on your own leg in those situations even if you're not a professional and you have the ability to obtain reasonable tools of self-preservation in even a medical context, right? Exactly. And that's all back to that fundamental right of, it's your body. And you have the right and the duty to control and protect it. Let's go back to something you mentioned previous, which I'm sure many of our listeners have heard before, which is a core part of this. More guns equals less crime, which is something that is said a lot. You mentioned it previous. A lot of people would say that just seems obviously wrong and the only people who would say that people out there clearly can commit crimes because they have access to violent weapon or at least more violent crimes. So how could it possibly be the case that more guns can cause less crime? Well, and it may not be that more guns up or down directly causes changes in crime. We have over 300 million people in this country and we have over 300 million guns. Now, suppose you change that drastically. Suppose we went from 300 million guns to 400 million guns overnight. All the guns multiplied like a simple multi-celled organism. Some of them like cloned themselves. The tribbles in Star Trek. Exactly. Or, and imagine otherwise, that they did a reverse thing. And so some of the guns merged with each other and now you had, instead of one guy who had three guns, now he has two. He suddenly went down to having 200 million guns instead of 300 million. My guess is that that drastic change plus or minus 100 million in the gun supply would have very little discernible effect on the crime rates up or down. What we can say we know for sure is that major increases in firearms supply and density are not associated with increases in crime. The gun supply in this country has increased massively by over 100 million over the last 20 or 25 years. And in that time, we have seen crime go down drastically including violent crime and including gun crime. In fact, gun crime declining more so than violent crime in general. That doesn't prove that having more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens led to a decline in gun crime. But it certainly shows that having increases in guns is not associated necessarily with increases in gun crime. It depends on whose hands they're in. If you put more guns in the hands of more law-abiding people, it's not going to turn those people into criminals. That's one of the big debates in the issue. Some people think that guns make people crazy. Guns cause people to become criminals. Can I quickly ask your mention – you say gun crime. Is that different from gun fatalities? Because those people – you give lots of people guns. They may not – the law-abiding people may not start committing crimes, but there could be more accidents, accidental shootings, things like that. Sure. Let's split those into two categories. On accidents. Our peak year – since we have data on gun accidents going back to the late 1940s. Our peak year per capita for gun accidents was – per capita – was in about 1973 or so. Since then, the gun accident rate has fallen by approximately 90 percent. And during a time when we've roughly tripled the national gun supply, so it's indisputable that more guns does not cause more gun accidents per se. We've made a lot of progress and improved safety training over the last 30 or 40 years. One of many examples is the National Rifle Association's Eddie Eagle program. Eddie Eagle is a character like Smokey the Bear who teaches kids safety. And Eddie Eagle's been taught to literally tens of millions of schoolchildren. And they have characters dressed up in the Eddie Eagle costume. And they have coloring books and all these things. And it's a very straightforward message. If you see a gun, stop, don't touch, leave the area, tell an adult. And of course, we have other things that have also made people more safety conscious about guns. And partly, I guess, is a fact of greater economic prosperity. There are now more gun owners who can afford gun safes, which reduces the chance of an accident. Hunter safety training was when actually hunting accidents are approximately half of all fatal gun accidents. Hunting accidents have also declined drastically because starting with New York in the late 1940s, new hunters at least have had to get hunter safety training. They're in Colorado. They have – it's a great program and teaches you all kinds of things about accident avoidance. Not just about gun accidents but how to avoid boating accidents. How to get in and out of the canoe without falling in the water and drowning, perhaps. So there's all kinds of constructive, positive things that have happened. That's why the gun accident rate is down by, I believe, 88% in general and 92% among adults – among children over the last 40 years. You would be hard-pressed to find any other social problem in this country which has declined so drastically as gun accidents. I was speaking at a continuing legal education program a few years ago to some – a group that is basically elite corporate lawyers of the Northeast. And we're having a gun debate and I said, OK, raise your hand. How many gun – I'm going to give you a number. Tell me if you think this is about how many gun accidents there are involving children, ages 0 to 14 per year, a million and 100,000. The answer – and the large majority thought the number was at least in the tens of thousands or more of fatal gun accidents involving children annually. The number actually is a few dozen and keeps declining even at that level. Let's go back to crime then. That's very interesting and I think that is true. There is definitely a sense that a gun in the home is like having a snake on the ground that you just keep in your house. So if we would decline to accidents but how about crime because we were talking about how guns can possibly decrease crime and they said they don't make normal people criminals. They don't turn a marginal person into a criminal. But do criminals really react to guns? Aren't criminals crazed enough to not actually care whether or not someone has a gun? Let's talk first on the gun in the criminal's hand. All the things that make a gun useful for self-defense, it's portability. It's the fact that you can use it at a distance. That's what really makes it unique because I know you can use bows and arrows at a distance too but guns are a lot easier for most people to use effectively and well than as archery equipment. A gun in the hand can be harmfully empowering to a criminal. Let's take a scrawny 16-year-old who wants to get some money by robbery. Maybe he can find an old lady walking down the street alone and he can physically threaten her and then successfully rob her. But against a tougher target, let's say a liquor store, if he just goes in with his bare hands, he could demand money from the old lady. He probably wouldn't succeed at that at the liquor store. But if he comes in with a gun, then that changes the equation. And so he might be a more likely criminal. Exactly. And you can imagine all kinds of situations that are like that. That's why it's important that there be policies to not only allow the choice of armament for the law-abiding but also to disarm the dangerously non-law-abiding. In terms of whether guns are a deterrent to criminals, one way we can find this out and has been done extensively is by asking criminals. The National Institute of Justice funded studies of incarcerated adult felons in 11 different state prison systems in the 1980s. And among the many things that we're studying in the survey was attitudes toward guns, where did you get your last gun, things like that. Have you ever personally decided not to commit a crime because you were afraid the victim was armed? And there was a very significant percentage of criminals who said yes. And then asked in general, do you think... I think it was 42% actually, a very large percentage. Yeah, personally. And then do you think criminals in general are reluctant to attack people they think might be armed and a huge majority said that. Other studies of...another study was done in St. Louis of active burglars. Not the ones who were in jail had gotten caught like this first National Institute of Justice State but people who were, I suppose, the cream of the crop of St. Louis burglars because they were career burglars who were out doing it. How do you survey those people? I think I was just wondering that too. You guarantee the anonymity, I guess. But you've got to find them first. That's why you call Batman to find Catwoman. It's the same type of thing. Yeah. Well, some high-end sociologists really have those skills like good journalist street reporters do is they know how to network and talk and meet some people. And then you talk to one guy and then meet some others and your network. And so they did this study of over 100 currently active St. Louis burglars. And this was also what they found was very consistent with prior studies that have been done of incarcerated burglars who were easier to find. The American burglars' biggest part of the working day is casing the joint, is observing the potential target and making sure no one's home. And that actually takes way more time than getting in and out and taking the stuff. American burglars work very hard at this because according to the burglars, they're very afraid of getting shot if they enter an occupied residence. It is by far their largest occupational hazard and the risks of it are at least as high as the risk of getting caught and ending up going to jail. What you figure if that's a deterrent, I might go to jail. Well, I might get shot. It's even more immediate deterrent. And that's one of the reasons why in the United States our rate of when you have a burglary of a home, what fraction of those burglaries take place when the victims are at home? Well, in England, the majority take place when the victims are home. At that time, I'm thinking, right? Of course. Yeah, they're mostly like, if you want a victim at home, better chance of getting them once everybody's at least home for dinner. The English burglars prefer this because they get wallets and purses will be home and therefore you can get cash and unlike stolen goods, which you have to sell at a discount and have some difficulty in carrying away, cash is great. You get 100% of the value of the cash immediately. An enormously high burglary rate, not only for the home invasion percentage but the total burglary rate in England is extremely high where the government more or less forbids people to own guns for self-defense and makes gun ownership in general extremely difficult. In the United States, the studies show that only a quarter or less of home burglaries are against occupied residences because most burglars try to stay away from them because of the occupational hazard of encountering an armed homeowner. Well, I think someone then would say, okay, shotguns, we often hear this, Joe Biden's favorite weapon, shotguns then maybe even handguns but that's okay. It's easier to own shotguns in Australia and other places to Europe but why, if we're going to have protecting people in their homes, do we need to give them these weapons of war, these assault weapons, these things that are only good for military purposes? How does that add to the home defense or self-defense equation? Oh, well, genuine weapons of war wouldn't which is why, for example, you wouldn't have a good Second Amendment argument to say, well, I would like to own a bazooka or a nuclear weapon or a tank, a large quantity of poison gas, I need some anthrax for home defense or for that matter, according to the Supreme Court machine guns or saw it off shotguns. The machine guns meaning when you hold on the trigger, it releases a stream of bullets. Yeah, exactly.  Wasn't that what an assault weapon is, though? No, that is a deliberate lie invented by the gun prohibition lobby. You can trace it back to a memo by a guy named Josh Sugarman who now runs the Violence Policy Center and in 1988, he was working for a different anti-gun group and he put out a memo saying and this is not a secret memo. You can find it on the Internet. Sugarman explains, look, the media has gotten bored with our handgun ban stuff. We gave it a good try. We got as far as we did. We had HCI, which was handgun control. Yeah, look, we're just not getting traction on this anymore. So we need something new. Let's do assault weapons. And as he said, the public and the press will think if it looks like a machine gun, it is a machine gun. And that was the whole strategy. The strategy of Abraham Lincoln, testing Abraham Lincoln's theory and Sugarman certainly proved you can fool all of the people some of the time and for a while he filled a majority of the people on this issue. But the fact that a gun looks like a machine gun doesn't mean it is a machine gun. You cannot, as an observer looking at a picture of a gun in the newspaper, see the internal mechanics which tell you whether it is a machine gun or not. A machine gun fire—so the most popular rifle in the history of the United States is the AR-15 rifle. Which is produced by a variety of companies. Right. Originally, yes. Came out and introduced in 1964. So it's been around for quite a long time, extremely popular, very, very mainstream American gun. It is a semi-automatic. It fires one bullet each time you press the trigger.  Well, that's right. And the concept of a semi-automatic which ejects the empty shell casing using some of the bullet energy from the gunpowder explosion and then loads a fresh round into the chamber, that's been around since the 1890s. Semi-automatics are today 82% of all handguns that are produced in the United States and are a large fraction of rifles, one of several popular rifle types. So the fact that a gun is a semi-automatic means it's using a technology that is now roughly about 120 years old. Not some kind of new, fancy, high-tech idea, just a continuation of something that's been with us before anyone listening to this podcast was born and probably before their grandparents were born. That's how old semi-automatic technology is. But yeah, some semi-automatics look like automatics. All the difference in the world, I mean, between an automatic and a semi-automatic, because I once said in an oral argument to a court on this issue, which the judge I think found amusing, you know, there's a difference between your honor if I called you a wit versus if I called you a half-wit. So the difference between automatic and semi-automatic is enormous. And American law has always consistently, at the federal level, almost always, said yeah, machine guns are one thing and other guns are a whole other thing. The guns that fire one bullet every time you press the trigger, we're going to put them in one category, and the guns that fire an infinite number of bullets as long as you keep the trigger pressed, we're going to have a separate category for them. And then the assault weapons ban of 1994, we hear a lot about that and it gets discussed every time, because it seems like these AR-15s get used by school shooters and other mass shooters, which maybe is just a reason to take them away anyway, but we did that with the assault weapons ban. What did that ban and what did it do? I guess what is an assault weapon? Is there a difference between semi-automatic rifles and assault weapons? No. The objective of the gun prohibition lobbies, which exists not only in the United States but in other countries, is to ban as many guns as possible under the currently achievable conditions. You have some countries which have outlawed all semi-automatic rifles. In the United States, that is not currently politically feasible, so there is an effort to pretend that, oh, some semi-automatic rifles are okay, but others are really bad. And so what's the difference between them? Because in the internal mechanics, how fast can you fire one semi-automatic is going to be just about the same as any other semi-automatic. And so you end up with things based on cosmetic features or things that have nothing to do with the gun's rate of fire. So for example, the Dianne Feinstein's assault weapon ban that was enacted in 1994, one of the things that makes something an assault weapon is whether it has a bayonet lug on it, because that means, oh, this gun is military. Well, the number of drive-by bayonettings, drive-by crimes in this country has been very low for a long, long time, at least since the Civil War, maybe before that. That's horse-by bayonettings, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so why is a gun that has a bayonet lug on it some kind of awful thing that no reasonable person would ever want to own, and then you take that same gun and you take the bayonet lug off and, oh, well, that's a nice, happy sporting weapon according to the definition in the Feinstein-Clinton assault weapon ban, which Congress, I think, rightly let's sunset in 1994. And then when we had this... 2004. 2004, right. An act of 94 sunset by its own terms in 2004. New York, Connecticut, where the governors and Michael Bloomberg exploited the New Town murders and tried to ram through successfully gun ban legislation. What gets banned is, well, does the gun have a folding stock on it so that if you're taking out for hunting, you can carry it more easily on your back? Or an adjustable stock? Lots of guns these days now have an adjustable stock. And the stock on the long gun is the part that you hold up against your shoulder to secure the gun and have a solid point of contact for steady aim. Well, not everybody in this country is the same height or has the same arm length. So manufacturers have been making stocks adjustable these days more and more so that if you're a six foot six inches tall, you would have the stock be longer because your arms are longer for the proper fit. And on the other hand, if you're five foot three, you would have the stock be shorter. And that, according to Connecticut and New York, is some terrible thing that transforms a nice semi-automatic gun into an evil assault weapon. So the definitions are utterly irrational and they make sense only from the point of view of lobbies that say we want to ban as many guns as we can. How much – how inclusively can we write this definition? Even in New York today, we still can't ban all semi-auto rifles. So we'll just define what we call an assault weapon as broadly as we possibly can and all the better if as in New York the governor forces the spineless legislature to vote on the bill before they've even read it. It seems like you hear this a lot because one of the things that I've heard them say, why are we banning guns that are used responsibly 99.8% of the time and they often say it's a start almost as if showing their hand that they want to get rid of all of these guns. And do you think that that's true? Do you think that despite them maybe saying sometimes that we don't want to ban all guns, do you think that many of the prohibitionists actually do want to ban all guns? Their logic has no stopping point. I would also say that if you – I've met a lot of the folks in the gun prohibition lobbies over the years and some do want to ban everything eventually although they recognize they might not get there within their own careers and others sincerely would not and they would think that there is some category and they might not have an exact definition but they think there's at least some category of nice gun rifles and shotguns for hunting that people ought to be allowed to use to have under at least some circumstances. But what we see in other countries is there's never any – an individual anti-gun lobbyist might be satiated but the movement itself can never be because as long as you have some famous atrocity and so you crack down on gun owners, on law-abiding gun owners and ban a larger category of guns. Okay, well that keeps things satisfied for a few years but then there's some other crime and we're an accident or whatever and so then there's this new thing. Well, we have to do something. Okay, well we've already banned A, B and C so now it's time to ban D, E and F and you just keep on going and they're – so that's why I think the pro-gun groups are right to say we are not going to accept the banning of anything else, period. They draw a line on the sand on that. There's this media myth that the NRA, which is by far the most influential of the pro-second amendment lobbies, they never compromise. They're totally hardcore and all that. And that they opposed everything before, right? Right, which is – That's just wrong, right? It is historically wrong and the NRA may have its idealistic rhetoric but then, you know, like any organization that actually is effective in a legislature, you have to compromise and do things and sometimes you accept more of a restriction than you'd want in exchange for improving on other things. And that's, for example, how we got licensed carry in most of this country now is the laws that we have on how to get a permit to carry a gun for lawful protection, which are typically fingerprint-based background check, you know, a biometric check, mandatory safety training, and even on top of that, some discretion by local law enforcement to deny a person who's maybe has a clean record but there may be something identifiably wrong with them. The town drunk or something like that. Exactly.  The NRA wouldn't necessarily favor all of that in a platonic ideal world but they've accepted that as to get an effective licensing system up and running and I think that that's good. But what they do draw the line on in an absolute sense is no gun bans. No, we're not going to accept anything that bans more stuff. You mentioned other countries but isn't it the case that there's a lot of other countries say in Europe that have much stricter gun control laws than we have in the U.S. and also have much lower rates of gun violence? Like the United States seems to be, we've got a lot of guns and a lot of gun violence. Well, yeah, and of course that's the frame that the gun prohibition groups want you to say that in. If you are attacked by a rapist who has a gun, is that what's the difference from being attacked by a rapist who has a knife or three rapists who have their hands and feet and beat you up and severely injure you? England and especially Scotland is a much more violent country than the United States. These days when you look at total major violent crime, the four classic categories of homicide, rape, aggravated assault and robbery, robbery being an in-person confrontation for the taking of money. Now in 1925 you could say England had a much lower crime rate than the United States and had much more repressive gun laws. Today England's gun laws have gotten vastly more repressive than they were in 1925 and its violent crime rate has skyrocketed.  Its gun homicide rate is lower, but it is certainly not a safer society at all. And then you add on top their burglary problem, which is not counted as major violent crimes, although often burglaries do lead to violent crimes against people in the home. But the lethality rate, that might be important too. We might want to say, okay, people, we would rather have assaults with knives than guns, right? In terms of lethality. So maybe they've solved one problem of having more people robbed, but fewer people dying from it. Yeah, and that's essentially the argument of Franklin Zimmering, one of the most eminent American criminologists. And really the, going back to the late 1960s, sort of the intellectual founding father of pro-gun control social science research. And Zimmering is certainly not a junk scientist or anything like that. And he's got a book on that called Crime is Not the Problem, which is, he says, don't think so much about the crime rate, think about the lethality rate. And if we can just have more bar fights that end in knife brawls instead of shootings, that would reduce our homicide rate. And he has a point on that. The people, if you want to avoid getting shot, one of the top things on your list should be don't go to sketchy bars on late, on weekend nights. Get really drunk and then get into confrontations with similar people. There's a lot of homicides and knifeings and shootings and other things that come out of those kinds of situations. And he's absolutely right that if you had those, if we had more knives and fewer guns in those situations, it would reduce homicides. The question is, how are you going to go about doing that without, you know, if you had a magic magnet that took all guns away, that would do it. We haven't invented the magic magnet yet. But failing that, the problem is the kind of folks I mentioned who get into these confrontations with each other are the ones who are least likely to be affected by the laws. Every state in the country, it's illegal to be an actual physical possession of a gun like, you know, wearing it on your body while you're intoxicated. Well, they were already breaking that rule. And they are the people who have the easiest access to the black market. And the fact is with the gun supply that exists in this country and with the ease of homemade manufacture of guns, a black market is very likely to supply at least all of the exactly the kind of people you would prefer to disarm first in the Ximring scenario. You know, there's a lot of talk these days about 3D printed guns and we'll see what happens with that. But the fact is you can manufacture, if you know how to run a home, machine tools at home, it is possible to build functioning guns. And around the world, West Africa, Ghana, Philippines, Micronesia, there are people who are building large numbers of guns under conditions a lot more difficult than, you know, the guy – they are so far below what the average guy who, you know, has some machine tools in his garage can accomplish. I mean, they're using, you know, literal wood fires to heat the metal and things like that and building effective firearms. And in those countries as well, it all depends on who has the guns. In some of these countries, the – well, again, the government bans guns because they're authoritarian and don't want any tribes other than whatever tribe is running the country to have any power. And in some of these places, they see people build guns and they use them for hunting to feed their families. In other places, people use guns for negative purposes. It seems like most of people who would start building guns would probably be on the criminal side than on the law-abiding side. Well, let's say if – yeah, in the United States, sure. In Ghana, I would say. I mean – Well, most of the people who are going to Christian churches in Iran are – and China are maybe criminals too in the sense that the government's outlawed something that's a fundamental human right and people are evading that. But I don't think that's a true crime. Let's go back to mass shootings, which usually are the things that catapult the gun issue into the media, into the public eye. And you hear a lot of discussions of gun-free zones and making sure that we have gun-free campuses and making sure that we don't allow guns in these areas or trying to get rid of certain weapons. In terms of mass shootings, how should that affect the debate and how can we best deal with mass shootings? Well, mass shootings like political assassinations – you know, President Kennedy and then Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the 1960s – these are the core drivers of the political success of the gun prohibition movement. They – most of the time don't get very far on their issue, but what gives them that spike and that window of opportunity is a atrocious nationally – internationally famous crime. And so that's why they used Newtown, which took place in mid-December, and by January the New York State Legislature had passed a bill without even reading it because it was such an emergency and a terrible bill. A bill that, for example, harmed law enforcement a lot. They say it made it illegal for law enforcement officers to have arms at school. Well, a lot of schools have school resource officers and safety officers, and that would be – and it's not like the legislature actually thought we want to ban law enforcement officers from having guns at school. They just wrote the bill so fast, and actually Frederick Dichter of the New York Post reported this, is basically nobody had a clue what was going on, and they were just – the governor's office was taking its drafting information from the Bloomberg group and from the Brady organization. And, you know, those people know that they don't like guns, but in terms of that detailed, careful legislative drafting of how are you going to fit this into New York's enormous body of statutes, they didn't take the time or have the ability to craft that properly. Gun-free zones, I think, are fine as long as they really exist. So let's – let me give you an example of what I think is a proper gun-free zone. In Colorado, we, like most of the country, have a fair process for law-abiding adults to get a permit to carry a handgun for protection. The state statute says, okay, well, what about government buildings? And the answer is if a government building wants to ban licensed carry in there, they can. They can have a gun-free zone. They just have to make it real, which means you, at every public entrance, you have metal detectors and you have armed guards there. And therefore, that will work to say, okay, now once you're inside the Department of Motor Vehicles, nobody's going to be carrying a gun because we've checked to make sure about that. What is harmful, drastically harmful, is the pretend gun-free zone where you put up a sign that says no gun's allowed. Well, the only people who obey that are the law-abiding people. And it means for the criminal, you've got a great opportunity of guaranteed unarmed victims or at least the vast majority of victims will be unarmed because they're law-abiding. They follow the gun-free sign. Mass murders seem to happen a lot more often in gun-free zones than in other places. And one of the reasons you don't hear about the mass murder that happened in the non-gun-free zone was because often the criminal got shot at the beginning. As that ever actually happened? It happened two days before Newtown at a mall in Oregon where a guy with a rifle, crowded mall Christmas season, all that guy with apparently visibly mentally disturbed goes and starts shooting at a mall in Oregon. A citizen with a gun shoots him. No story. No big story. No national story. I wrote an article in the Los Angeles Times in January of 2013 which cataloged about a dozen of these innocents. All of the famous mass murders you never heard about because they never became mass murders because they got stopped earlier by law-abiding people, sometimes law enforcement officers and often not, carrying firearms. More recently, there was an incident in Philadelphia where a psychiatric patient started shooting people. He was absolutely, everybody says in retrospect, clearly on a rampage, would have killed dozens or more if he could have. Well, it turned out that a psychiatrist in the hospital illegally had a gun. He was violating that hospital's gun-free zones policy. He had a gun and he shot the criminal and saved dozens of lives. And the hospital fortunately did the right thing and said, well, actually, yeah, you did violate our policy. On the other hand, you saved probably 50 of our employees from being killed. So we're not going to fire you for this one. We're almost out of time. So I was hoping maybe you could close by giving us a sense of where Second Amendment jurisprudence is right now. The lower courts are working on adjusting to the new world of the Heller and McDonnell decisions from the Supreme Court where the Supreme Court said, hey, you know, that thing that comes after the First Amendment, that's really part of the law, too. And you've got to follow that. And as Justice Alita wrote in McDonnell, the Second Amendment is not a second-class right. It is as fundamental as the other rights in the Bill of Rights including the First Amendment and courts should treat it with equivalent respect.  That's an important American value for people to have freedom of that. I as a judge am going to look carefully at the law rather than just lazily accepting a government's justification for it, which might not necessarily have much factual or logical support. Some courts have followed what the Supreme Court has said, and that means they've taken a rigorous and serious look when gun laws have been challenged and sometimes they uphold those gun laws because the laws properly pass the tough but not impossible tests that exist in our jurisprudence for having regulations or restrictions on constitutional rights and other laws the courts have said fail. Those are the good courts. There have also been some bad and lazy courts which are just recalcitrant as some judges knew that Brown v. Board of Education was the law of the land, but they were not exactly enthusiastic about making it apply within their jurisdiction. So we have a variety of judicial responses. Are you hopeful though? It's a generational thing in part. Federal judges are not on the cutting edge. They're not designed to be. They're not on the cutting edge of social change and new attitudes. The fact that a bare majority of the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Second Amendment being a real existing actual right in 2008 came long after. Well, the American public had always thought the Second Amendment was a real individual right. Even in the elite academic world, that idea which was sort of widely accepted for much of our country's history but then became anathema as of, say, 1975. The academic world had long since returned to recognize that the Second Amendment guarantees some kind of meaningful individual right. And the Supreme Court came along last, not leading. And I don't think the courts want to be the vanguard of social change these days, but they rather reflect the consensus that's already emerged. So you have some federal judges who came of age in law school in, like, 1973 when if you were in constitutional law class and somebody raised their hand and said, well, Professor, what about the Second Amendment?  Really, what case says that? I don't know, but what are you, some kind of right wing crazy nut? You know, maybe we'll kick you out of school except we don't have policies like mentally ill people out of school yet. We're going to change that. You know, you couldn't even discuss it legitimately. And now, of course, you can in law schools. So, William, you have courses on the Second Amendment. I'm co-author of the first law school textbook on the Second Amendment. So, you know, look at women's rights. Ruth Bader Ginsburg's the first textbook on women's rights as a topic worthy of being examined in law school came out in 1971. You couldn't have said, you know, you couldn't have made women's rights arguments which are now very mainstream in constitutional law in law in a law school in 1933 or you would have gotten mocked just like making Second Amendment arguments in 1973. So, but over time the judiciary will change and we will have a new more progressive pro-rights, hopefully, judiciary that comes along. But in the meantime, there are plenty of good judges who are conscientiously trying to follow Heller and McDonald and that sometimes leads to the more inappropriate anti-gun laws being recognized as unconstitutional. Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod, that's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


Big game coming up against the Arizona Cardinals, but before we get to that big game, we got some big questions from y'all. First one came from my guy, Gareth, who is a Team Keeping Clean Patron. Shout out to the Team Keeping Clean Patrons. He said, hey Raven, I haven't seen a question in a while. How are you and the family? We are doing excellent. I appreciate you and I hope you're doing even better. He said, I really hope everything is well. Do you think if we trade for King Henry, does this mean we have enough to get to the Super Bowl? Now look, even before the Baltimore Ravens, if they were or are to trade for Derrick Henry, I think they already have enough to get to the Super Bowl. I think they are a very well-equipped team with nice depth that has enough to make it to the big dance, to the big game. And to win it too, because making it is one thing, but winning it is another. So I think they have enough already, but you add a King Henry or whoever they end up adding via trade, if they do trade for somebody, I expect them to, but we'll see. But I think they have enough already, but you can never have enough talent. You can never have enough quality depth. So yeah, Derrick Henry would just make them that much stronger. And then he said, and which of these two players would you sign, Geno Stone or Patrick Queen? As always, thank you for being a great person.  You're talented and thank you for always lifting my mood up when I feel down. Hey, I appreciate that, man. I don't do nothing crazy. We ain't got no talent or nothing like that. We just sit here talking behind a camera and that's it, man, but I appreciate you for sure. Now back to your question, with Geno Stone, between Geno Stone or Patrick Queen, which one would I sign? You know me, I would sign everybody. I would keep both of them. But probably Patrick Queen, Patrick Queen, because Raven's already have somebody in the secondary that being Marcus Williams. And I would just really have to hope that he stayed healthy moving forward because I don't want to look back and be like, man, we should have kept Geno Stone. Next question came from my guy, Cody. He said, hey man, love the videos. Appreciate it, Cody. He said, just watch the new video on our interest in Derrick Henry. I think it could potentially go bad if we go and get him. We just filled our Y receiver room to the brim and our offense is a lot more pass oriented now. We aren't necessarily a run first team anymore. So is it really a good idea to trade for running back, taking over 50% of the snap count in Tennessee? We'd love to hear your opinion. Well, something that got brought to my attention, which I didn't even really think about, one depth, one quality depth, or I guess that's one A1B, but two playoffs, playoffs in that cold weather.  You don't want to tackle that much more. So if you got to deal with Derrick Henry, like they don't want Gus Edwards alone, that's tough enough. But then you got to deal with Derrick Henry too. Like think about how opposing teams would just, they'll be breaking tackles all day long, especially in the cold, especially in the snow game and the winter game. Like that would play to the Baltimore Ravens advantage. And then just give them another weapon. So I don't really see it going bad in that sense cause it just makes them stronger. Next question came from another patient, my God, Dominic. He said, what's up in Graven? Hope you were having a wonderful day so far and the fame as well is good. So I just wanted to touch on something that I don't think is getting noticed about this new offense and that is the amount of available check downs. Oh yeah, talk about it, baby. He said, I don't know if anyone else noticed it as well but those check downs actually go a long way in using the running backs more and letting them make something out of nothing. To me, I actually see the running backs getting schemed open, which is crazy because they be so wide open on those plays as well. Let me know if you see this as well. That's a really good point. Them check downs have been making a big difference. Justice Hill been getting them like crazy. Gus Edwards been getting them here and there but yes, they have been working a lot and it just opens up the offense that much more. Question came from my guy Raven Pride. He said, what's up in Graven? I hope you're in a family well. Well, you know I got a good one. So let me lay it on you. I believe this game against the Lions was a must win because that game told us if we were in the mix with some of the top teams that they call the top teams and the Lions were definitely one of those teams. Much love to team keep it clean. Well, hey, there we go. So I guess Ravens are one of the top teams. I still, for Ravens, I will put them right now. Maybe I like, let's see how they do against the Cardinals, man. Let's see if the Ravens, like if they're consistent and they actually take care of business and do not play down to competition against Arizona. If they really take care of business, then I'll probably put them at like, maybe like number three or four or something. Like maybe like four or five right now. I can't put them too high right now. Next questions came from my guy Jarvo. He said, watch a video about the upcoming decisions EDC has to make this off season. So here's my question to you. If you were EDC, which upcoming free agent would you try to get a deal with first and what order would you go in as far as getting a deal done with a player? I can see Patrick Queen leaving since we drafted Trenton Simpson. Much love to you and your family and always keep God first. I appreciate that. Man, I honestly forget a lot about Trenton Simpson. I completely forget about him because he's been on special teams and I just, we haven't seen him on defense, like Harley at all, if at all. But anyway, order that I would do it in, probably at a BK first, because that would be the most expensive. And then Patrick Queen and then after that, I mean, yeah, and if I could hand out those two and I wouldn't even worry about the rest for now. I just worry about those two first and foremost. And if I can get that done, then the rest would be the rest. But he also asked, watch your take on us trading for Derek Henry. And I was wondering if we did trade for him and try to resign him, how would that impact the other running backs moving forward? I mean, if they traded for Derek Henry, then that would already let the other running backs know like you would be taking a back seat. Like, cause that's business. And he said, also, if we trade for Daniel Hunter or anybody, how would that impact us resigning our soon to be free agents? Well, again, it's business. It's business. If Raven's traded for somebody, especially somebody like Daniel Hunter, then that definitely, that wouldn't just be no rental, in my opinion. Derek Henry, I think could be a rental, but the Daniel Hunter, somebody like that, I don't think he would be a rental. So it just put everybody on notice and make everybody have to play that much hard and make everybody really earn, they keep that much more. So it'll make their jobs that much tougher, but easier at the same time. But that's not a question. Is there a player that you can see us getting that nobody is talking about? If so, who? Oh man, my God. Shout out to my God, no off and for the flock. Because I love how he presents. Like I always say, man, I feel like he is the best Raven's content creator that's doing it. He is amazing because he does some of everything. He does the latest in breaking news. He does film study too. He does the rumors. He does literally everything. So shout out to Northam for the flock. But what he presented, a lot of times he'll present stuff that will be outside the box, stuff that I won't even be thinking of. And I mean, it's easy for me not to think of stuff because this brain is only so little. But anyway, what he had been the one suggesting Josh Jacobs. And I'm like, man, that is a good one. Cause he'd been healthy. We've been missing that from our running backs. But another running back that he brought up was Alvin Kamar. And I'm like, man, Alvin Kamar like literally fits this offense perfectly. His style, his style of being patient, catching out in the backfield. Like he fits this offense perfectly. So if I had to choose a player that nobody's really talking about, it would probably be Alvin Kamar. Javos next question. He said, is there a way we can get King Henry and the Neil Hunter? Cause we know the cap is not really cap. Hey, if there's a wheel, there's a way. He also said, who is your top five or 10 most valuable players on this Ravens team? And why? I'll go with maybe top three. Cause top five is a lot. Top 10 is definitely, you know how I feel about top 10 list. Lamar Jackson, not in no order really. Lamar Jackson, Justin Tucker, Roquan Smith. So I just stick with those three for now. Cause the whole thing that that'll be too much for me to think about. That's a long list. He said, shaking my head. This is still from Javos, by the way. He said, I was on a talk show and said the Ravens reached out to him. What? No, he said SM. Oh, I think he meant Sue, but he put SMH, but I guess it's auto-corrected to SMH. But he said, Sue was on the talk show and said the Ravens reached out to him on it about a deal a few weeks ago. Have you heard about this? And what are your thoughts on adding him to our defensive front line? Oh yeah, I'm sure you saw the video on that where we talked about Adam again soon. But yeah, I wouldn't mind it cause it shows that the Baltimore Ravens are looking to get even better, even though they're good there right now. He said, maybe it's me, but it does seem like Air Reed doesn't include himself in Ravens activities or functions. I never see Air Reed around like I do other Ravens legends. He wasn't even at the Ring of Honor for sizzle. I don't know. I don't know. I know him and Hobb all kind of like had a little thing and they say they cool now, but still even if you, sometimes even if you get cool with somebody, like you'll be cool, but sometimes you still remember.  We cool, but are you treating me? So he may be like, you may be like, not even a cool, you may be a lukewarm.  I hate that Keaton Mitchell and OBJ couldn't get a touchdown, but they were close. My question for you is about Mike McDonald. Do you see him leaving us for another team next year? Cause we know teams might be calling. Great to see Batman back in shutting people up. Blessings to you and the family. Hope all is well in your infam. And next Sunday, a meeting with Hollywood Brown. Ooh, but yeah, I can see Mike McDonald being gone. I can see him out of there because like, yeah, he's been an excellent defensive coordinator. It's only been, this is his second year, but he's hot right now, man. And his name will continue, especially if he continues to do what he's been doing, especially when you think about all the players that have been out at one time, it's scary to think about. So I do think he could end up being gone. Ooh, that boy Javo took the whole show away. Anyway, the next questions came from my guy, Bibi. He said, when the Ravens went to Super Bowl this year, I liked that. He said, he ain't say if, he said when, but when Ravens went to Super Bowl this year, do you think Harbaugh would retire and let Money Mike take over as head coach? I could see, if Ravens went to Super Bowl this year, I could see Harbaugh just calling it quits. Cause that would allow him to go out, gracefully go out on top, even though he's going to be able to go out on his own terms anyway. And he already got, he's already going to be like a Hall of Fame coach and all that. He already got a lot of accolades and whatnot. But that would like really cement his status and he'd be set. He'd be set. And then he would finally be able to say, Hey, look everybody, I want a Super Bowl without, or Ray Lewis and Aireed on the sideline. Ooh. And he said, also do you think Zay is offensive rookie of the year thus far? I don't know. I don't know. He been having some nice numbers and nice impact. Is the offensive rookie of the year so far? I really have to think about all the other rookies. So I couldn't answer that honestly. And he said, what I was saying about a QB trade, and this was from a last question from subscriber video. He said, we both know Mac Jones as a backup at best. Justin Fields is on a team that is struggling terribly to find an identity. Hoodie, Bill Belichick, isn't going to invest any more into Mac because he has been tested with very decent quality players around him. My typo was two first rounds. It was meant to say one and Mac for Justin Fields. Okay. So first rounder and Mac Jones for Justin Fields. Now, we honestly haven't seen Justin have the opportunity with a good coaching and quality team. He has more talent than advertised. And I believe he can be more playing for an offensive minded head coach, but ain't Bill Belichick a defensive minded head coach, I believe. So yeah, I mean, a lot with quarterbacks is about a situation that has to do with literally everything. So if somebody could be the best of the best, but if they in a bad situation, they can really look really bad. So if they did that swap, I don't think it's happening. I can see them moving off of Mac Jones next year, one way or another. But as far as if they did a QB swap, you never know, man. Next question came from DeAndre. He said, do you think Andrew Voorhees will win healthy? Next season will be our new left tackle if we trade Ronnie Stanley. I don't think at this point it's time for, oh, excuse me, he said, I think at this point it's time for a new left tackle for better protection full of more. That's a lot of pressure to put on him. Like, okay, you gonna be the guy at left tackle from jump. And with Ronnie Stanley, again, I gotta find out how his contract is, but I don't see that. I don't know, would they move off from Ronnie Stanley? I don't see it right now. I don't, every time he gets hurt, I know the question comes up in our minds, but I think everything just depends on his contract for sure. But I don't think, I gotta look at his contract for sure, but by the way that they've done, every time they restructure, they go to Ronnie Stanley first. So a lot of his money has been pushed back. So if they moved off from him, they will be dealing with probably a lot of dead money. But I gotta look at the exact numbers to be for certain. Next question came from my guy, John. He said, what's up in Graven? So it hit me out of nowhere. Geno Stone is hot right now as of today. I believe he leads the league in interceptions and I don't think he's gonna resign with us. He's out after the season because he's making a name for himself. So why not since the trade deadline's not here yet? Get him for an offensive player. Now we have not been able to get a consistent, be a consistent team in the red zone and scoring after the first few weeks, that percentage has tanked drastically. So why not trade Geno Stone for somebody who might be on a trade block offensively because we have a great defense and rumors of Sequan Barclay, rumors of Devonte Adams. Me personally, I like to go with Josh Jacobs if we could, the Iron Man at Running Back or do it all running back. I'll run it back. Our running backs have been injury prone in the past three years now, but if not, then a wide receiver who's gonna make those catches. Why not package Geno Stone and Rashad Bateman for a high, highly disgruntled wide receiver? What do you think? No, I would not move off from Geno Stone. Reason being, Marcus Williams is hurt. Why, if Marcus Williams, him being hurt, him being injured and you got your backup safety playing amazing, playing amazing football for you. I get what you're saying. Oh yeah, trading while he's hot but you're gonna make your safety position weaker and that's a strength. And I mean, if you get something, you gotta give up something for sure but Marcus Williams ain't right right now. He's not healthy. So why would you take away somebody who's hot right now and then make that certainty and unknown? Next question came from my guy, B Lewis. He said, what's up Team KB Clean family? Oh, you picked one of my questions before so I thought I would throw out another one and see if mines think alike, if great mines think alike or maybe I'm just dreaming. Trade air line is coming up there, a lot of candidates, but only a few that realistically can add something to our team in my opinion right now. Anyway, and let me get straight to it. I believe we should offer Arizona a package that could involve DuVernay and Justice Hill with some low picks to bring Hollywood home. Hey, that's my guy. Y'all know I would love for Hollywood to come back but I don't think Hollywood wanna come back. Well, maybe he will wanna come back especially with Kyle Emery still being hurt even though Kyle Emery gonna be back any day now but I don't think he's gonna come back. I don't think he's ever gonna come back to the Ravens. It would be nice, but I don't think it's gonna happen. Anyway, you said that him and Zay together and his offense could give us our own version of what Miami is doing with their corner. Now I also think we can take advantage of the fire sale in Vegas and maybe grab some of the young corners like how to some slight and have an up and coming reliable second corner who could take the one when Marlon starts to tilt the other way. Just some thoughts, what do you think? Ooh, you already thinking about Marlon when he started falling off? Ooh, that's sad, that's sad to think about. Glad we got a long way for that though. You'll know when Marlon starts falling off when they start talking about moving him to safety. But as far as Hollywood, yeah, I just, I would love it personally, but it ain't gonna happen. Next question came from my guy, John. He said, hit me out. Everyone's talking about grabbing extra players on defense. I personally don't think we need that. When a Jobbo and Bowser come back, that's a, who knows when that'll be. But anyway, he said, when a Jobbo and Bowser come back, those are two key players in our defense. Why not go after not one but two offensive weapons if possible? I personally don't know if it's possible or not, but everybody on the same page. He said, but why not go get Hollywood Brown back? It's not like he and Lamar don't have chemistry. And then also find a way to go get Derek Henry a finisher for our goal line issues. Ah, man, I didn't think about that. See, that is a good point right there. Derek Henry on the goal line, yeah, touchdown every time. But I think that's about strategy too. That's about strategy because you know, like on a goal line, they do a lot of toss plays. They even do a lot of the toss plays. They do a lot of the pitch plays and whatnot. And I ain't a big fan of that, but that's what they be doing. So, yeah, if you could just run it up the gut, do it with us, that was why you got him. Why he's here, why like use him like that straight up. You ain't gotta get all pretty with the little, let's pitch it to the left, let's pitch it to the right, let's toss it, no, run it straight up. But anyway, and they do do it sometimes, but I feel like they could do it a bit more. But that's just me. Anyway, he said, that gives us two weapons to add to our offense. We have the number one defense at the current time. So even if we slip up just a little, but we're still gonna have a top three, hopefully by the end of the year, but to add to an offense like we've been seeing for years, to take an offense from the bottom half to the top half to add a top five defense, we are becoming the most dangerous team in NFL after that. What do you think? Oh, yeah, I mean, yeah, I wouldn't be mad at that at all, but yeah, Holly ain't coming home. We're about a whole contract too late for Derrick Henry. Next question came from my guy, Margie, said, that ain't great, and hope you and yours are doing well. What is the actual opinion on potential Henry trade specifically regarding him versus other potential options? Ravens have been linked to running backs for obvious reasons, but I don't get the link to Derrick Henry. From Titans being sellers. Henry is 30, about two years older than the next oldest candidate, Camero. Other names floating out there, say, come on, Barkley, Josh, Jacob, Delvin Cook. Personally, I don't find that Henry moved to be the best out of these options. Yeah, I think Kamara. Kamara would probably be the best option, the way he fits. But anyway, he said he's already seen 20 to 30 carries a game for the past four seasons, if not longer. His play has visibly regressed on the Titans and I know that offense is a mess, but he is also splitting the snap count nearly 50-50 with Spears. The dominant Derrick Henry was getting the ball on nearly every down. He was on the field for daring you to stop him as he made the whole defense scare. Now Rookie running back is pushing him for reps because he doesn't have the juice in him to have those performances nearly as often. I think a big part of it is too, the Titans with Derrick Henry, they are a very obvious team. What I mean when I say that is, when Derrick Henry's on the field, 99% of the time they running the ball.  It becomes so obvious when Derrick Henry comes on and off the field, if the Titans are passing or running, it's blatant. So, but if he was on the Baltimore Ravens, I don't think it will be so blatant well as long as the Ravens didn't make it blatant like they did with Patrick Clark like some for some years. Anyway, he said, sorry for the novel. I just think Barclay and Jacobs fit better in our offense. Guys that have proven they can play at a high level without already being worn down. Well, Barclay like, that's a lot of injuries right there. But anyway, he said, I'm sure Henry is still good, but I don't think he's a Super Bowl addition good. Yeah, like I said earlier, I think Ravens already could be our Super Bowl team, but Derrick Henry would just make them stronger like people talked about earlier, the goal line situations, and just that the quality depth, just in a playoffs. I do think he could certainly help. Is he the best option out of all the people that you named and that were named earlier too? No, I don't think so. Again, I do think my guy Noah from For the Flocker, he was on it with Josh Jacobs would be amazing and Alvin Kamara would be amazing. I think both of those guys would be even better than Derrick Henry. So we'll see what happens in a couple of days. Next question came from my guy Anthony. He said, what's the move? What's up in Raven Manette win over the Detroit Lions? What some people said was the best team in the NFL, that game was fun to watch and it was a complete game. After watching that, what do you see happening now with the Tragedy line? I feel like our past rush is doing what needs to be done. So is it running back? Is it cornerback? If Marlowe goes down, then what? He'll have an issue holding a rock. What say you GM? As always, hope you and your family well and trust. Oh yeah, I see running back, especially with everything that you just named, all the stuff that you just went through. I could see it being a running back for sure. Also, I don't really see why receiving not tight end. Offensive line, no, not really. That's why I keep going defense. I keep going defense because I don't see them training for anything offensively besides a running back. So yeah, that'll be it. I know some people have said corner. That could be it. I mean, their corner's been playing excellent, but I mean, if you can get an even excellent turn corner back, hey, why not? Like the more the merrier, like we always talk about quality depth. So I guess we'll see. Next question came from my guy, Jibbe said, what's up in Graven? This is my first time sitting in a question. I'm super hyped after that Lions game, but being a Ravens fan for a long time, I'm not fully convinced yet. I love that and I appreciate it and I respect it. He said, I'm not fully convinced yet because with this team, the one thing they lack is consistency. Thanks for taking the time to read my question. The hashtag TeamkeeperClean, appreciate that. You're right. You're a thousand percent right. And I get it. I get it. Like, hey, that Lions win was great. It was amazing, but let's see it continue. Let's see how you do with a much lesser, much weaker team. And in the way game, let's see if you play down to the competition or you rise up. Many questions on what could really put us over the top. Next question came from my guy, Elijah, he said, ain't Graven hope you and your family are doing well and hope everybody in TeamkeeperClean is well. Now I have to say I'm impressed by what I've seen from the Ravens thus far. Although I predicted a 15 and two high side and 13 and four as the floor, I still like our chances for hitting the ladder. Mike McDonald has been absolutely amazing, but is he really going to be snatched up before Lou? This is absolute blasphemy. This is truly unfair. How do the Bengals keep sneaking by year by year with a great defensive coordinator? Mike is only in his second year. I was fine with local media reporting to us about the possibility, but when I seen it go mainstream, I know the offers are probably gonna be on the table. Rants and thoughts. Hey, that's real right there. But yeah, defensive coordinator, he been doing his thing too. And then Bengals, they have a playmaking defense. And sometimes they can be a little stingy, which is obviously a good thing for them. But yeah, that's another one too. Like he said, number two, they asked Lamar about trap game, but I feel like we already dropped our trap game to the Colts. It's crazy that I predicted that lost preseason. How is this going to be a trap game? Bulletin board material or did we forget when they put a pick of Lamar with the caption running back? I think he gives him a concert in their building, a throwback, we all know. Okay, hey, I would love that. And you know like, y'all know Baltimore Ravens, they take that stuff personally and they don't forget about any of that. They remember. He also says, Sue, Henry, Hunter, I wanted them all. You were raving, you were raving, you were raving. For the first time I could say I'm okay with our receiving court. It's not perfect, but it's enough for Lamar. Our approach of power and speed out of the backfield has grown on me. Having Henry in the backfield, who's a combination of both would be sensational. It will still leave questions for next season on who will be our power back for next season. Him, JK, August, Mitchell will lock up our speed back. We can always sign Sue in a couple of weeks, but if EDC goes all in for Hunter and Henry, our draft will be practically non-existent. Superbowl baby in my TD voice. Sorry for the long question and ran much love for what you do for the flock community. Thanks for the varsity jacket plug. Gonna need that for the flu season.  But yeah, you said a whole lot of this one and I love it, especially the part where you said Sue, Hunter, Henry, you want them all. That's like me, greedy. Stone cold. Next question came from nine. He said, I engraving, hoping that prosperity and peace of following you in the family and all life fastest ever. I appreciate that. He said, just a thought. I know you've been talking about Gino basically playing for a check somewhere else, but considering that Gino is much younger, is homegrown and has been improving on not only a seasonal, but weekly basis. Why not keep him and send Marcus Williams out? Ooh, I said, ooh. He said, Williams is undeniably a threat at the safety position when he is available. As we all agree, it's not always about ability, but availability. Gino Stone has met both marks and exceeded expectation. Why not roll with a hot hand? I understand what we have given up for Williams, but he hasn't been available as promised. Very similar to the J.K. Dalvin situation. Sure, you're talented, but are you dependable? If it's me personally, I'm keeping Stone and seeing what I can get from Marcus Williams. I mean, would you want to give up a potential 2023 season league leader and interceptions? Especially if we haven't had a stud at the position since Airee left and retired. What are your thoughts?  Oh my goodness. I hate how you put it because the way you put it, it just, it makes so much sense. Oh, oh, that's tough. And I get everything that you're saying. Everything, everything that you're saying, it makes sense. Like it reminds me of Carson Wentz and Nick Foles. Obviously, Carson Wentz, that was a guy. That was a super talented quarterback. Make a lot of plays, was in MVP conversation, da, da, da, da, da, but he'd be hurt. Then he'd be hurt some more. Nick Foles came in, he was a backup, came in, did his thing, made the most of his opportunities and he took the team to the Super Bowl and they won. It's time to break in the Patriots. So they ended up keeping Carson Wentz though. And then they moved off him a couple of years after that. He was like, oh, this thing working. So I mean, I would get the decision if they did, could I get like availability? You talked about like, I cannot refute anything that you said, I can't, nothing that you, I can't disagree with it, I can't fight, I can't go against it because everything you said make perfect sense. So yeah, he said, all I'm saying is high level play definitely deserves high pay, but I wouldn't want to pay for inconsistent availability. He said, isn't, it isn't what you have, it isn't what have you done or what you could do, it's what have you done for me lately? And Lately Stone has been an absolute consistent dog. Sorry, that was a tongue twister. My fault. It's just a thought. Thank you for the unmatched Ravens content and coverage. You're definitely the best NFL outside. You're definitely the best NFL outside and I wish you get the recognition you rightfully deserves, you put out consistent quality work and like Gino, go team keep it clean. Oh, I like that. You put out consistent quality work like Gino. Oh, okay. Shout out to Gino Stone. He said, peace, blessings and success. Not in. This is great when, and again, like I said, I can't argue with it at all. And then last question on this special episode came from my guy Jaylin. He said, LJ and Munkin. What's up, guys? Hope you, everything is well with you and your family. This is, you know what? I ain't even gonna edit that out. He said, this is gonna be pretty lengthy. So get ready. I'm very excited about what I'm seeing with the relationship of Lamar and Munkin right now. The QB and OC relationship is one of the most important relationships when it comes to having an elite offense and team in today's game. And I think that's what we have with these two. I feel like Lamar is really growing and maturing with this season while Munkin is beginning to really dial up this offense and bring it all together. Lamar has always been able to navigate the pocket and evade pressure, but the way he is doing it right now is just different. Instead of escaping and running for a big run, he is moving the pocket, keeping his eyes downfield, and finding an open receiver for big chunks or touchdowns, while also still breaking off some big scrambles. He is looking very complete and comfortable and on the field at this point of the season. As for Munkin, I feel like he is coaching with a big picture in mind. For example, the quick pitch and short situations that he was running over and over and over, again set up the big tight end league play to mark Andrews that almost went for a touchdown. Or early on when he kept feeding Zato's jet sweeps, that has set us up to be able to cause misdirections and the defense when we send them in motion. That's a good point, really good points. Can't wait to hear your thoughts. Sorry for the long message and blessings to you and the family. No, don't apologize, man. That was great, because you brought out some great points. And yeah, that does make sense. And that's something that I got to think about too. Whenever I see Todd Munkin doing something, I'm like, oh, what are you doing? What's going on? It can be to set up something for later on. So it's all about patience. It's all about patience. It's all about being in the flow again. And hey, they're going to be something like that. Don't like what Todd Munkin is doing. Don't like what the offense is doing. I'm like, what's going on with that? But it's all part of the process. So hopefully it does lead to even bigger and better success for the offense for the rest of this football season.