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To read more about Episode 290, visit the main episode page.

Michael Moore [00:00:15] Hello, this is Rumble with Michael Moore. I’m Michael Moore. 

[00:00:22] This is day 128 here in 2023. And as I began this recording right now, I just checked because it changes sometimes from hour to hour, but we have now had 199 mass shootings in the United States of America just since January 1st, just since the beginning of the new year. So day 128, but 199 mass shootings, more than one a day. And, of course, one of the ones that occurred this weekend was in Allen, Texas, just north of Dallas, at an outlet mall. An individual with an AR-15 went in and just started shooting up the place. And I believe the latest count is that 15 people were shot. And some news agencies are saying nine have died, others have said eight. Whatever it is, it’s awful. There’s a number of people in the hospital in critical condition. And now it’s just… It is now the norm. It is something that we are being taught/trained to expect every single day, sometimes twice a day — mass shootings. 

[00:02:04] And, you know, I’ve been dealing with this issue for a very long time, and right after Sandy Hook happened about ten years ago, I was on, I think it was Larry King on CNN, and they asked me to come on to talk about it. And since Columbine, because of my film, I was always being asked to come on and express my thoughts and ideas, feelings, whatever, after each of these shootings and I was being made part of the norm. “Oh, let’s go to that ‘Bowling for Columbine’ guy. And let’s get him on and see what he has to say.” And I said on the show live, I said, “This is the last time I’m going to come on any show after a shooting because I will not be part of the new norm. I’m just sorry to tell you this right now, but don’t bother to call me because I’m not going to be a pundit about this. We need action — real action — to change who we are as Americans, to deal with our violent nature and to discover what else it is, because there’s other violent countries have a huge history of violence. You know who you are. But there’s something about us, and there are countries that have guns — Canada is a big country of hunters, etc. — but they don’t kill each other like we kill each other. Why is that? 

[00:04:04] The NRA got Congress to pass a law many years ago that specifically prohibited the CDC or any agency with a government grant from studying why these shootings and killings with guns occur more in the United States than anyplace else. Why us? And they got this law. Democrats voted for it. It passed so that we could never actually have scientists, shrinks or whatever figure out what is it about us? It’s one of the many things the Democrats and the others need to fight and overturn. Because this does need to be studied. 

[00:04:59] So when I was on that show ten years ago and I said, “Don’t call me anymore. I’m not going to come on these shows.” And I think I’ve only been on once. And that was a personal call from Chris Hayes and his show asking the night of Uvalde, Texas, here, last Memorial Day. And I went on and I was pretty angry and tired of talking about it. I only want to participate in something that’s going to require action by me and everybody else. 

[00:05:36] But when I was on ten years ago, I said, you know, I think let me just say this… I don’t want to get into this too deeply right now, but someone in law enforcement had shown me some crime scene photos of a shooting, and it was so horrific to see. They wanted to show me what an AR-15 bullet — we call them “bullets,” but they’re not really bullets in those guns. They’re like mini missiles. He wanted to show me what it does, especially what it does to a child. And, essentially, if shot at a child’s head, especially at close range, it blows the head off or at best blows the face off the child. You know, once you see something like that, you can’t unsee it. And I was so shaken by it. And I thought, you know, actually, this is what moves Americans. We’ve made huge societal political changes based on the visual image. Emmett Till’s mother in 1955, the summer of ’55, wanted an open casket after these white supremacists and Klansmen murdered her son down south. He was visiting relatives from Chicago and he was down south, and they brutally, brutally tortured him and murdered him. And she wanted America to see, especially white America, to see what had happened to this black child. I think he was 14 years old. And she insisted on it and they did it. And they ran the pictures in the newspapers and Americans could see what they did to this child. And it so moved and shocked people that, I mean, historians will tell you this was one of the pivotal moments of the Civil Rights Movement. This was just four months, I think, four months before Rosa Parks decided not to give up her seat on the bus and kicked off the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King and the modern day Civil Rights Movement. 

[00:08:01] And she talked about the effect that had on her. Of course, if you were black, you already knew the torture and the abuse and the lynchings and everything. But for white America to see this, it started to tick up in terms of the number of people that were going to be supportive of the civil rights movement. And throughout the movement, the police with the fire hoses on children mowing them down with high pressure water in the streets, beating John Lewis on the Selma bridge, sicking dogs on protesters, nonviolent protesters. Awful, awful stuff. And it was on the evening news all through the late ’50s, the ’60s, and more and more white people had had enough. A lot of them still wanted to hold onto their racism, but they did not want dogs sicked on children, fire hoses, beatings, lynchings — they’d seen enough. So the visual image played a very large role in the Civil Rights Movement. And Martin Luther King knew that and said that, yes, I’m a pacifist, but I am here because I know that the hateful supremacy of those who would like us dead, their violence will help us win the cause. Because he believed that most people would not support violence like this. 

[00:09:44] Vietnam came along and one of the big turning points of American public opinion against the Vietnam War was a little 9-year-old girl running down a road, screaming, crying in pain. She’s completely naked because the napalm we dropped on her village burned not only all her clothes off her, but burned her skin off her. And so she’s running down stark naked with the skin flapping off her bones, essentially, in a horrible, torturous pain. And when America saw that on the news in the newspapers — the photo won the Pulitzer Prize, I believe, that year — it was so horrific they couldn’t take it anymore. And public opinion turned. It was already turning because the Pentagon hadn’t figured out you can’t allow the news cameras to show this devastation. And so while you know, at the 6:30 national news every night, you saw American soldiers literally dying, being shot in the battlefield, falling over and dying. And then there was, of course, the incident we’ve talked about here in the past that the South Vietnamese general, the head of the police in Saigon, taking a prisoner just out in the middle of the street, handcuffed and putting a gun to his head and blowing his brains out, literally blowing the brains out. You see him blow out the other side of his head while you’re sitting eating dinner at 6:30 at night watching the news. And people turned against the war. They turned against Johnson and then they turned against Nixon on this war, and eventually the war ended. But not until we killed anywhere from 2 million to 4 million Southeast Asians and nearly 60,000 of our soldiers dead for nothing. But it was the visual images that really turned people against the war. And it shouldn’t have to take those visual images, I get it, but it works. 

[00:12:07] So I said on this CNN live show there, their 9:00 show, the Larry King Hour, “We need to show the crime scene photos from Sandy Hook. You need to see six year olds with their faces blown off, six year olds with their heads blown off, decapitated by what’s called a “bullet” from an AR-15.” And I said, “I believe that there will be parents who are going to not want their children to have died in vain, and they will allow the crime scene photos to be seen and I was going to see what I could do to talk to the parents and to show America what our inaction on guns does to a first grader.” Well, the next day it was all over the news: Michael Moore is going to get the crime scene photos, Michael Moore is going to show the crime scene photos. And they went crazy in Connecticut. Sandy Hook was in Newtown, Connecticut, the elementary school. And within days, they had introduced legislation in the Connecticut legislature to specifically prohibit crime scene photos from the public having access to them and specifically in regards to Sandy Hook. And in all the arguing over this, of course, I’m brought up as the culprit who’s going to show the country what these guns really do because I believed Americans, American parents, if they really saw what happens with an assault rifle that’s shot pretty close to a little child, the horror, the horror of it, would be enough to stop it. And so anyways, they passed that bill in the Connecticut legislature, the governor signed it, known as the the Michael Moore crime scene photos bill — that wasn’t an official name, but, you know, they were very afraid that I had access. It seemed like I had seen something or shown something and they were going to stop it. 

[00:14:28] And then this weekend in Allen, Texas, because this is an outlet mall — so, you know, it’s not like an indoor mall, it’s an outdoor mall — and so a lot of the dead were sprawled on the sidewalks and in the doorways of the stores and of the restaurant there and mangled, mangled by these so-called “bullets.” And it’s made its way around the Internet because, you know, remember, everybody is a cinematographer now. Everybody, in their pocket, has a video camera and can film their own short film of what they see. And people did this yesterday. They posted it. It went viral on the Internet. Maybe you’ve already seen it. And this is something I’ve suggested for the last decade. And I think now we’re going to see more of this and hopefully it will not numb people to the violence after you just see so much of it. You then get used to that. That becomes the new normal. But I have some ideas here. I have to say, I can’t tell you really what they are because I need to accomplish my goals here so that I can make my contribution to stopping this violence. But I have a couple of cards up my sleeve here, and I am in such a rage over all of this continuing and the heightening to the level it’s gone in the last year here, in the last few months since Uvalde, a year ago this month. And I’m on fire. I’m on fire, and I’m not going to be quiet and I’m not going to sit around talking about this, I’m not going to do a bunch of podcasts about it. I am going to act regardless of the consequences. Because if you really… If you really believe in protecting the children of this country and protecting all citizens, you don’t need a gun to do that. You need to be a citizen. You need to participate in our democracy. As do I. And we have to do everything we can do. 

[00:16:49] And it’s not just about passing gun control laws — we definitely need to do that. We definitely need to ban what they call these assault weapons. But I’m telling you, my friends, it’s going to reach a point — and I’m talking to you, gun owners. You’ve had a long time to fix this problem. Your failure to do so… They reposted that tweet from Governor Abbott in Texas. This nutty Governor back in 2015, he posted a tweet. It said, I just read a shocking statistic — I’m paraphrasing, I don’t have it in front of me — he said, I just saw a shocking statistic today that Texas is number two in the country in new gun sales. California, he wrote, is number one. And then the last line — come on, Texas. Don’t let California beat us. Wow. So they’ve had enough time to fix it. The gun owners, you haven’t fixed it. It’s gotten worse. So now, we’re going to take the guns away, just like they have done in the UK, just like they did in Australia, just like they’ve done in many countries. And yes, you’ll still be able to hunt and there’ll be ranges where you can go target shooting and all that. But the way that we’ve been doing it doesn’t work. That’s going to change. You know, it’s coming down the pike here. That’s why you’ve been buying so many extra guns. 400 million guns in our homes now. 330 million Americans, 400 million guns. Somewhere in your head, you know, this isn’t going to end well. And every single day we go through these mass shootings now, every single day and sometimes twice a day. I’m done talking about this. I am going to get busy. I’ve already started on my plan of what I’m going to do. It may be seen as controversial. You should just look at it as this is a good American who cares about his country and cares about the safety of its people, especially its children. And this is now going to end. This carnage is going to end. And I’m going to invite you to join me in that — nonviolence, the end of this madness. 

[00:19:34] Yeah, I want to actually… I’m going to make the podcast short today. Let me just thank our underwriter here and then I’ll come back with just a closing remark. But I want to give a shout out here to the people who are supporting my podcast today, and that is Stamps.com. For the last 25 years, as many of you know, Stamps.com has helped millions of people save time and money when it comes to shipping. They basically bring the post office to you wherever you are, whenever you need it, day or night. No lines, no traffic, no waiting. All you need is a computer and a printer and you’re up and running. You can compare rates, you can print postage or schedule a package pickup. And they offer huge discounts, up to 84% off Postal Service and UPS rates. So, my friends, set your business up for success when you get started with stamps.com today. You just sign up with a promo code “MOORE” for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a free digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. So just go to stamps.com, click the little microphone at the top of the page and enter the code “MOORE” — that’s me. And by the way, thank you, Stamps.com, for supporting this podcast and for supporting my voice.

[00:21:08] Okay, so, my friends, I’m going to bring this to a close. I am going to get busy. I will inform you down the road here what I’m up to when it’s ready, when I’m ready to have you join me. We’re not going to wait for the politicians. We’re not going to wait for anybody, frankly. And remember, a big part of this, as I showed in my movie 20 years ago, there’s something about us that we have to fix. Us as Americans. That, along with the gun laws that we’re going to get passed, we will bring this insanity down. I believe we’re capable of that. It won’t be easy, but we can do it. And I’m going to hopefully show you how we can do it. 

[00:22:06] So thanks, everybody, for tuning in. I was going to do a little lesson in satire today to kind… You know, I think Americans also we are satirically illiterate, somewhat. Irony — it’s a big problem understanding what that is. So I’ll get into that here in in the coming weeks. And pay attention to what’s going on with the Supreme Court and the way that they’re on the take here. They’ve been bought off. Clarence Thomas has to go. Gorsuch has to go. John Roberts has to explain the $10 million that his wife has taken as a consultant to high end law firms that argue cases before the Supreme Court. This is dirty, dirty, dirty, my friends. And in part, to get to accomplish what we’re going to need to accomplish to end the gun insanity in this country, we’re going to have to fix the Supreme Court and soon. So a lot ahead for us here on Rumble. And I thank all of you for listening, for caring, and let’s let’s get busy. We can do this.

[00:23:22] Thanks for listening. Thanks to my producer and my editor, Angela Vargos. Thank you so much for all your work on this podcast and all of you who are participating and trying to create a better country and a better world. 

[00:23:38] I’m Michael Moore and this is Rumble.