Democrats have spent thirty years promising that one more gun ban will finally fix violent crime.
Their friends in Hollywood nodded along the whole time.
But Bill Maher sat down with a best-selling liberal author and handed gun control Democrats bad news about their favorite ban.
What Bill Maher Told Malcolm Gladwell on HBO
Bill Maher is nobody’s idea of a Second Amendment champion. The host of HBO’s Real Time has spent years mocking gun owners and the voters who sent President Trump back to the White House.
So it caught people’s attention when Maher used a recent episode to take apart the centerpiece of the Democrat Party’s gun agenda. His guest was author Malcolm Gladwell, and the topic was what to do about guns in America, according to Breitbart.
Maher started with a concession most Democrats refuse to make out loud.
“First of all, whatever it is, we’re not going to get rid of guns in this country. We would have to confiscate them. And that’s just not going to happen,” Maher said.
He didn’t stop there. Maher told Gladwell that “we concentrate on the wrong type of guns.”
“Assault weapons, yes, they’re sexier and they’re bigger and they look scarier, but that’s not really where the problem is,” Maher added.
Gladwell agreed with him. Breitbart reported that Gladwell called assault rifle bans silly, said they mostly regulate “cosmetic attachments,” and said it’s a mistake to focus on categories of guns at all.
Both men also said handguns account for most gun violence.
The Numbers Democrats Have Known About Since 1994
Nothing Maher said is new. Gun owners have made the same point since President Bill Clinton signed the federal “assault weapons” ban in 1994.
That law banned rifles based largely on how they looked. A pistol grip, a folding stock, or a flash suppressor could turn a legal rifle into a banned one, even though the rifle fired the same round at the same rate.
Congress ordered a study of its own handiwork. The National Institute of Justice funded the research, and criminologist Christopher Koper led the final installment in 2004.
Koper’s report found that criminals used the banned guns in only a small fraction of gun crimes even before the ban took effect. He concluded that renewing the law would likely produce effects on gun violence that were small at best and possibly too small to measure reliably.
Congress let the ban expire that same year.
The FBI’s own homicide tables tell the same story. Rifles of every kind, not just the scary-looking ones, show up in roughly three percent of murders. In 2019, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting data recorded more murders committed with hands, fists, and feet than with rifles.
And yet the ban never left the Democrat wish list. Joe Biden demanded a new one throughout his presidency. Gun control groups still point to later studies that link the ban years to fewer mass shooting deaths, though the government’s own commissioned research never found a measurable drop in gun violence overall.
Maybe that’s the tell. A policy that fails its own official review and still tops the agenda thirty years later probably was never about crime numbers in the first place.
Where the Left’s Argument Goes After Maher’s Admission
Here’s where gun owners should keep one hand on their wallets.
Maher and Gladwell didn’t conclude that gun control fails. They concluded that Democrats aimed at the wrong target. And the target they named instead is the handgun, the firearm tens of millions of Americans keep in a nightstand to protect their families.
But the Supreme Court already answered that one. In District of Columbia v Heller in 2008, the justices struck down Washington, DC’s handgun ban and recognized the handgun as the weapon Americans overwhelmingly choose for self-defense in the home.
So the Left is boxed in by its own logic. The rifle bans don’t touch the problem, as Maher admits. The handgun bans run straight into the Constitution. And Maher himself says confiscation is “just not going to happen.”
That leaves the one answer Democrats never want to discuss, which is the criminal holding the gun. Handgun violence clusters in big cities run by Democrats, where soft-on-crime prosecutors plead down gun charges and anti-police politics drove officers off the job after 2020. A rifle ban does nothing to a repeat offender who walks out of court on reduced bail.
And law-abiding gun owners have always understood this. They watched politicians who couldn’t define an “assault weapon” campaign on banning one. They heard former US Representative Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) vow on a 2019 Democrat debate stage to take AR-15s away from the people who own them.
Maher has now admitted on HBO what the National Rifle Association said for three decades. The ban targets looks, not lethality.
It’s a little funny who gets to say it. When a gun owner in Alabama makes this argument, the media calls him a bitter clinger. When a liberal comedian and a New Yorker writer make it on premium cable, it’s a thoughtful exchange.
But don’t expect Democrat politicians to drop the ban because Bill Maher told them it’s pointless. The “assault weapons” fight raises money, rallies activists, and lets politicians look busy while violent crime grinds on in their own cities.
And once the Left concedes the rifle ban is cosmetic, the pressure shifts to the guns Americans actually rely on for protection. Gun owners heard Maher clearly, including the part he didn’t spell out.
Sources:
Breitbart, “Maher: ‘Assault Weapons’ Are The Wrong Place to Focus, ‘Not Really Where the Problem Is'”
National Institute of Justice, Christopher Koper, “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003” (2004)
National Institute of Justice, Jeffrey Roth and Christopher Koper, “Impacts of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban: 1994-96,” Research in Brief (1999)
FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Crime in the United States 2019, Expanded Homicide Data
US Supreme Court, District of Columbia v Heller (2008)