Welcome to the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church, and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU and he's a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

We have a heavy subject today as we discuss gun control in the wake of the

deadly school shooting in Yuvaldi, Texas and the recent shooting in Buffalo, New York

two weeks ago. Richard, when mass shootings like this happen in the United States, they're more common here than in, I think, any other country.

When these awful events happen, the cycle tends to be shock and outrage, a fight over possible gun control laws and then it seems like inevitably in action not much changes.

Is it ever going to be possible for us to stop mass shootings in America or does widespread gun ownership mean that there's nothing we can do?

Well, I don't know how fatalistic to be on this topic, but I'm certainly not on the optimistic

side. I have yet to see any set of proposals that have been made for controlling

this issue, which is strong enough to command even a substantial minority of the overall population.

Let me sort of go back and start about the theoretical framework,

because we'll give you an interest to why it is that this thing is so difficult to track.

On the first point is when you're dealing with crimes, there there two ways to deal with them.

One is you deal with them after they've occurred and the others you deal with them before they

occur.

If you're dealing with the thing after has occurred, all elements of uncertainty

about what would have happened are gone and you only have

evidentiary disputes of one kind or another. And then when you find somebody what you can do is you could

punish them in a particular case and there's really no great risk of overbreath with respect to what you've done, no illegitimate curtailment of natural or individual liberties.

It turns out that the ex post remedy is in many cases peculiarly in

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