Michael Brant Shermer was born on September 8, 1954 in Los Angeles. An only child, he was raised in Southern California, primarily in the La Canada Flintridge area. His parents divorced when he was four and later remarried, his mother to a man with three children, who became Shermer's step-sister and two step-brothers, and his father to a woman with whom he had two daughters, Shermer's half-sisters. His father died of a heart attack in 1986, and his mother of brain cancer in 2000.

As of 2007, Shermer lives in Altadena, California. He married Jennifer Graf, a native of Koln, Germany, on June 25, 2014. The ceremony was performed by Shermer's sister, Tina, who was ordained online for the occasion. Politically, Shermer has described himself as a lifelong libertarian. In a 2015 interview, Shermer stated that he prefers to talk about individual issues, lamenting that, in the past, people would refuse to even listen to him because of his self-description as a libertarian. In this same interview, he also mentioned that his research into gun control lead him to believe that some measures to reduce gun-related violence would be beneficial. The first president he voted for was Richard Nixon in 1972, which, in light of the Watergate scandal, he calls his "most embarrassing vote". In 2000, he voted for Harry Browne to "vote his conscience", on the assumption that the winner of the Al Gore - George W. Bush contest would be irrelevant. He later regretted this decision, believing that Bush's foreign policy made the world more dangerous, and he voted for John Kerry in 2004. Shermer has named Thomas Jefferson as his favorite president, for his championing of liberty and his application of scientific thinking to the political, economic, and social spheres. He says of Jefferson, "When he dined alone at the White House there was more intelligence in that room than when John F. Kennedy hosted a dinner there for a roomful of Nobel laureates." Shermer once opposed most gun control measures, primarily because of his beliefs in the principle of increasing individual freedom and decreased government intervention, and also because he has owned guns for most of his life. As an adult, he owned a .357 Magnum pistol for a quarter of a century for protection, although he eventually took it out of the house, and then got rid of it entirely. Though he no longer owns guns, he continues to support the right to own guns to protect one's family. However, by 2013, the data on gun homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings convinced him that some modest gun control measures might be necessary. Shermer also previously favored capital punishment, primarily in sympathy for victims' families, but later he came to oppose the death penalty, partially out of a resistance to giving the government too much power - in light of the hundreds of executed individuals who were later revealed to be innocent - and partially from his view that retributive justice is driven by humanity's baser instincts, and it does not effect restorative justice. He later changed his mind about the issue during research for The Moral Arc, reasoning that "[Capital punishment] is one of these barbaric practices that we need to get rid of. [The United States of] America is really the last of the 19 industrialized democracies to have the death penalty. (...) The Italian enlightenment philosopher Cesare Beccaria, on his book On Crimes and Punishments, put forward the idea that the punishment should fit the crime and that the criteria should be whether it keeps people from committing crimes, and the Death Penalty does not do that." CANNOTANSWER

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