By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
A British-Canadian journalist and self-described gun control advocate who has authored a new book being released today—The American Way of Killing—told Time magazine in a Sept. 22 interview that he doesn’t think bans on so-called “assault weapons” work, and he also acknowledged the elimination of handguns is not likely possible.
Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer at The New Yorker for the past 30 years, has published eight books relating to the social sciences. He has finally gotten around to discussing gun-related violence in the U.S., but it is not clear that he understands the importance of the Second Amendment, and right-to-bear-arms tenets woven into more than 40 state constitutions.
Asked by Time editor-at-large Belinda Luscombe whether he things banning modern semiautomatic rifles—the so-called “assault weapons” now the subject of an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court with oral arguments scheduled Dec. 2—his reply was blunt.
“No. Assault-rifle bans of the sort that have been passed and contemplated in the United States are completely pointless,” Gladwell stated. “They’re just a charade, and they are a distraction from the real issues. I think gun control can play an important role in violence prevention. But empty theatrical exercises in removing a class of rifles because they look a certain way do not move the needle.”
Coming from a gun control proponent, that amounts to blasphemy. And while Gladwell sticks to his guns (no pun intended), he admits the elimination of handguns in the U.S. is unlikely.
Aside from Supreme Court rulings that handguns are protected by the Second Amendment—which protects the right to keep and bear arms from government infringement—he just doesn’t believe removing them is possible.
“There’s the obvious political thing that people with guns are the most motivated to fight hardest politically,” he observed. “The Supreme Court currently has been captured by a majority of people who believe very strongly in gun rights. I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of guns there are in America, but there’s a lot. Practically speaking, I don’t know how you get rid of them. No one’s ever answered that. I’m as big an advocate of gun control as anyone else, but I have no clue about how it would work if it was passed. I mean, are you going into people’s homes to remove their guns? Very few gun-control advocates have a good answer to that question.”
Gladwell doesn’t mention the high court rulings which say gun ownership, especially handgun ownership, is protected by the Constitution. But he does point a finger at liberals who are adverse to recognizing that irresponsible people use guns to kill people, and that the gun, itself, doesn’t make that call.
“One of the many annoying things about the gun debate in America is the extent to which liberals roll their eyes at ‘Guns don’t kill people; people do,’” he told Time. “I understand their aversion to it because it was dreamt up by people who wanted to escape any responsibility at all for the presence of guns in America…One of the irresponsible things about progressive views on gun violence is the extent to which they use their legitimate antipathy towards guns as an excuse not to address more fundamental issues about human behavior.”
He also maintains that the so-called “epidemic of gun violence” often claimed by anti-gunners, is “an epidemic we invented.”
He doesn’t think criminal activity in the U.S. is inherent, but a problem “that was brought about by a wide set of very specific choices, misapprehensions, and errors.”
In a proverbial nutshell, Gladwell may have unwittingly indicted the political left. They don’t like guns, but their solutions, such as banning the most popular rifle in America, are non-starters. In reality, they really have no solutions at all that will pass muster under the Second Amendment, which is enjoying something of a revival under the Roberts Supreme Court, and many observers expect that to be strengthened even more when the Court rules on the constitutionality of semi-auto bans sometime in mid-2027.
