Changing the Technology of the Gun: the End of Impunity, the End of Anonymity, the End of Privacy.

so about gun control about the legislation of of gun control and limiting uh gun violence um all of the technology that fits into this cellular phone i mean i have the i have the rubber wrapper on this it's unbelievable how slender cell phones are now when i was a boy i did envision this technological transformation happening i was following what was happening in technology i did think that this was inevitable but i imagined it being more like a brick i did think i did think we would all be carrying around with us portable computers that incorporated telephones and cameras and things computers and word processors and email and at that time the fax machine you know i thought yeah the equivalent to the fax machine is going to be miniaturized and made portable this way so and so forth um but i knew what circuit boards looked like i knew circuit boards were becoming more and more powerful but i never thought circuit boards would be so tiny as this um that i can place it between my thumb and forefinger like that um i did assume it would be bigger even though i i did it was partly because of the science fiction i was reading you know something i reflect on partly just because of the science i thought we were moving towards a society where everyone had this kind of camp video camera and computer with them at all times all of the technology that fits into this tiny cell phone can be fit into the handle of a gun all of it it is possible for every firearm in the united states of america to take an image take the photograph from a forward-facing camera and to take a photograph from a backward-facing camera of the shooter and the person being shot and to send it over the internet to the police station instantly every single time you pull the trigger it is possible for a gun to record your location with gps a global positioning system the same way that every cell phone records your location with every text message so some of you may have followed this in the news some of you may not have i have covered on my channel at least one case where there's evidence presented in court of exactly where the person's car was because they were text messaging while driving and you get a map with a series of dots saying yeah at exactly this moment she was driving her car at this intersection at this moment she was at this stoplight at this moment she was on the freeway because it's someone engaged in this conversation that is on the record for the government recording her precise location what she was doing moment by moment with the cell phone okay having all of the technology that is within a cell phone built into every firearm is attainable it's easily attainable there was a time when i was a boy imagine if someone had said to you when i was a boy i were talking about more than 30 years ago oh it'll be possible in the future to have a fingerprint detector that instantly reads your fingerprint and confirms that you're the owner of the gun that might have sounded ridiculous or impracticable 30 years ago now every single one of you is familiar with just how streamlined that process would be just how instantly you can verify your identity um with facial recognition right a lot of you have phones that scan your face with fingerprint recognition right so if you allow government regulation of gun ownership we could be in a situation where when someone is mugged they pull out their gun and point it at the mugger and without even pulling the trigger that gun is already taking photographs and uploading them to the internet i've been sending them to the police the gun is already recording your exact location the direction the gun is pointed in who it's being pointed at and it's even photographing it could be recording audio too you could have a microphone in there just as well as we have it's recording exactly what happened to all parties moment by moment for the historical record and in a sense if you're defending yourself against a mugger that could be a reason not to pull the trigger because as soon as you got the gun out you can say look you know when this goes to court you've already been had like it's over so like you should not attack me you should put down your weapon or you should because look when the cops go over this footage they're gonna know exactly what happened and who you are in your face and where we were and what happened so just just give up just wait for the cops to come don't ruin your life don't put yourself in jail longer and don't get shot right so it may seem paradoxical because you have fewer shootings that way you could have a database in the same way that today we are recording the location of every single voice message every single text message every single email sent from a cell phone every single bullet that's fired in the united states america that's far fewer what do you think there were more of in america today text messages or bullets being fired and yeah a lot of that things in that database it would just be okay at this time in this location someone was firing a bullet in the middle of the forest they were killing a deer a lot of it's going to be information that's not legally useful or interesting but then everyone involved would know that from the minute it doesn't even have to be when they pull the trigger it can be when their hand is on the gun right it can be before even if it's only a few moments before they pull the trigger their location is recorded their identity is look reported right who it is they're pointing the gun at is recording you can even have a rear-facing camera recording that you're the one holding the gun that today is easily attainable in the united states of america and guys guns are expensive i mean do you think this would even increase the price of firearms by 40 i don't i i think this would be invisible i think you might be talking about twenty dollars into the pricing because you can buy a cell phone for forty dollars most of the cost is the screen you know obviously we're not gonna have we're not talking about having a full color screen on your gun so you can watch movies so you can watch youtube videos on your gun right so there are a lot of features of the phone that are not going to be there it's going to be cheaper than a phone anyways right but i'm saying the other elements of cellular phone technology cellular phone networks and so on those can be seamlessly invisibly integrated into even a handgun of course there's plenty of room in a shotgun right so we're not on the cusp of a new technology that could change gun violence for several decades that technology has existed wouldn't you like to know what happened in each and every gun battle in america's conquest of iraq america's conquest of afghanistan the ukrainian war against russia right now with the same level of specificity this could be the end of war crimes as we know it imagine a man who's aware of this in time of war this is one of the most common crimes in in modern warfare imagine a man raping a woman at gunpoint sorry guys this is real talk we're talking about the real world here and he's aware that this is being photographed his precise location that it's his fingerprint on the gun he's aware that his army commanders are going to know this that the police are noticed that the people who write the history books are going to know this that this could never be secret that even if he kills her after the rape so she can't tell anyone else which is also common in war in case you didn't know that his crime exactly what he did exactly what he said can be a microphone recording his voice in the content too that that will be recorded for posterity how would soldiers behave differently even with the stress of the battlefront right even with the stress of being in a war zone if they know who they shoot what they say and what they do is being recorded and that if they die their heroism will be recorded for their own parents to see for their own children and grandchildren to see perhaps right and that if they behave dishonorably what they do in war will be there for their parents to see for their grandchildren as well as journalists politicians military commanders we have reached the point where the medieval fantasy of an omniscient god can be a technological reality built into the steel housing of every handgun and this isn't new most of you are too young to remember a time before this technology existed i'm just barely old enough to remember the rise of the cellular phone the idea of mandating it is new okay because most people in positions of power do not want cell phone cameras and cell phone recordings of what goes on inside guantanamo bay when prison guards just within the normal prisons of new york city rikers island whatever example you want when prison guards brutalize and intimidate and beat inmates when prison guards shoot inmates people in positions of power are quite comfortable with the ambiguity of relying on the word of the one and only witness to the event who most often is the man who pulled the trigger that when police shoot people there are people in positions of power who are very comfortable with the only version of events being the police officers version and i'm not comfortable with that we are progressing toward a society in which the professor standing at the front of the university has a camera recording everything he said whether it's built into his hat or his eyeglasses or or what have you and where every single student in the crowd has a camera of some kind recording what happens and this will result in a higher standard of behavior a higher standard of deontology if you like for the professors and for the students alike right uh when i grew up there were these cases of he said she said about professors sleeping with students or professors flirting with students professors saying politically and correct things in class sometimes professors saying racist things in class okay well that's over we're entering into an era when even the most trivial controversy of this kind of a politically incorrect professor this kind of thing where your opinion doesn't matter because we can all consult what's on the tape quite possibly from 40 different angles from the perspective of 40 different students each and every one of them has a recording device so what is the future of gun violence in america is it a future of anonymity and impunity that's that's what military gun violence has presumed that's what police gun violence is presumed again there are a lot of other people with guns like prison guards right anonymity impunity no accountability and the elderly people who are currently in power i'm sorry but politics is dominated by geriatrics people over 80 the politics within the republican party within the democrat party it's old people it's people joe biden's age and older who dominate politics in most western democracies today they're real comfortable with that all right and there's a new generation coming up that's saying whoa whoa whoa whoa there's even a minor dispute between a taxi driver and his passenger it's all on tape like we're get we're used to this you know sometimes the taxi driver punched the customer and but they say yeah yeah but i punched the customer for a reason you have to see it in context we are accustomed to seeing footage of um diners at mcdonald's freaking out and assaulting the staff at mcdonald's can you trip they grab a bunch of plastic spoons and throw them at the person they're you know we know exactly what they did we know exactly what they said within the halls of power this may be different where you are but in taiwan every time members of parliament punch each other it's on camera and they do they fight you know they beat they get into you know fisticuffs in parliament they were kind of little riots within their house of parliament where they really they really uh yeah yeah some i mean you know where you live your house of parliament your you know i would assume most of the world every you know uh every little thing that's said and done inside your house of prominence okay so you think the battlefront just doesn't matter you think what soldiers do in times of war is less important is less significant than whether or not this taxi driver made a racist remark that justified the passenger in the taxi punching the driver or you know whether or not there are two different versions where the taxi driver says the passenger refused to pay money and the passenger says no the taxi driver ripped me off and stole my money all of these petty disputes right we don't rely on witness testimony anymore we rely on the god-like omniscience of portable recording devices that are in every home they're in every pocket and they can be on your hat or glasses or pin to your lapel they're one of the major responses to police brutality within the last five years has been to demand that every police officer wear a camera at all times and then there's a separate question which is constitutional who gets to control that footage is that footage immediately uploaded to youtube where everyone can see it is it somewhere you know more freedom information act request where everyone can see every minute of every on-duty police officer's life that if you're on duty with a gun anyone can access that or as often happens is the footage only released after being censored after being edited that it's controlled and that sometimes conveniently police department should say they lost the footage the footage isn't available so if you follow these kinds of things in politics you are aware these are these are issues the existence and presence of the so-called body cam that's the term the body cam oh oh so only police officers are going to wear a body cam huh not not soldiers in time of war does that matter more or less again taxi drivers okay what about the mayor the mayor has no body cam it's all just he said she said [ __ ] for for the mayor what about your member of parliament like what about really important political events secrecy anonymity impunity or accountability transparency now again i used the example of a university professor for a reason you know i realize it may seem like a stretch we're talking about gun violence now you're talking about a university professor preaching from the pulpit to his students okay i have known so many university professors who would be ashamed to watch the film of their own behavior back again they'd be so ashamed just to hear the words out of their own mouth i've known university professors who showed up drunk to give their lectures there are university professors who show up under the influence of other drugs but there are also just university professors who have a short fuse who lose their temper there are professors who preach ridiculous extreme political ideologies extreme political views right and without even someone else to criticize them i'm just talking to people i've known right i could sit down with so many people and just play the tape did you did you realize you said that like did you this will bring about a change on the part of the behavior of the university professor now guys students are not angels you know i wonder what impact you would have if you started really invigilating the behavior of students or it's like look not only is it we know you cheated on the test it's a real issue and i've really seen it cheating on tests and exams but like where someone some authority figure is sitting down with a student saying look this is what you did during that one hour lecture you played video games city like we know we have videotape evidence that you sat and played video games you weren't paying attention you're not taking notes you're not doing this but you know maybe that you were sleeping whatever i mean i've been in the room where every other student behind aside from myself the extent to which they're in no way participating in their own education or they're not doing what academia demands of them and you can have rules you can enforce this you can enforce higher standards of of excellence and behavior so yes sam walsh mentions um car dash cams so this is a camera on the dashboard of a car cars now increasingly have have cameras built in yeah i mean i'm just barely old enough to remember when that was new you know um but for my generation i mean if you were just five years younger than me you didn't see that change i remember reading a story in the newspaper and it was very moving and it was from a black guy describing the racism of the police uh this was in toronto in canada and then grabbing him and throwing them in the hood of the car and this stuff you know but what happened at that time was that you found that many many of the people who at that time because they weren't aware of the dashboard cameras themselves like because it was that new many of the people who claimed the police were racist and claimed they were corrupt and claimed misconduct the dash cam footage proved that the person making that complaint was either deeply dishonest or insane or both i saw a lot of that just at that time right when it was really new that actually people have become accustomed to being able to make up stories about police misconduct now some of the police misconduct was real but so many people were lying before the advent of the of the dash cam right so this is another real this is another real change right so um yeah this is an answer waiting for someone to ask the question as soon as we allow the regulation of guns this is the answer not just in the united states in switzerland in taiwan in japan in communist china the answer already exists the answer is there and the answer is irrefutable some things are so trivial they should not be recorded by hidden cameras or i'm not saying hidden cameras miniature cameras portable cameras right if you put your kid into a daycare center do you want the daycare center to have cameras on all the time let's say one kid in a million dies in a horrible accident while they're at a daycare center right let's say some something terrible happens to just one kid in a million at a daycare center do you you want it recorded if something goes wrong if your kid is somehow hurt or harmed do you want to have according to that we accept that pilots in airplanes have no privacy there is a black box recorder in every cockpit every single word that the pilot says is recorded every decision every button he or she presses while flying the plane why because it matters we have an united unspoken standard that some things matter so they must be recorded however inconvenient or embarrassing again there's a further question that requires legislation requires an amendment to the constitution i think in every country in the world what happens to that footage does everyone get to hear it like is there an access is there a process where when the plane crashes if my my ex-wife dies in the plane crash or something i want to know exactly what went wrong with the the pilot can i access the recordings can anyone or is it only released when some government agency or some private corporation has had the opportunity to censor it to decide whether or not i've been put these are these are big momentous questions right something as seemingly trivial as dropping your kid off at daycare something that obviously involves life and death decisions like flying an airplane when you pull the trigger of a gun how can that possibly be less significant a decision than pressing send on a text message of course your location should be recorded of course a digital photograph should be taken of course it should be uploaded to a database your pinpoint location on a map and these other details should be immortalized they should be available to the authorities to the police i would say they should be available to journalists or to anyone who's interested your own relatives your own cousin is wondering what happened in that shooting and you're involved you were involved with they should be able to get the objective truth right and we have already decided that we're willing to sacrifice our so-called privacy privacy a concept that's not in the constitution that's not legally financed just a cultural notion of privacy we have decided that we're willing to give up that privacy every time we send an email from a cellular phone every time we send a text message of course we should give up the idea of impunity anonymity privacy when we pull the trigger of a gun of course there are not two sides to that debate there is one answer and it's the same answer for switzerland for taiwan for thailand as it is for the united states of america it is an answer waiting for someone being willing to ask the question