{"id":119017,"date":"2026-09-29T19:59:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T00:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=119017"},"modified":"2026-09-29T19:59:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T00:59:21","slug":"119017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=119017","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Author, Self-Described Gun Control Proponent, Says Gun Bans Don\u2019t Work<\/a><\/p>\n

A British-Canadian journalist and self-described gun control advocate who has authored a new book being released today\u2014The American Way of Killing\u2014told Time magazine<\/a> in a Sept. 22 interview that he doesn\u2019t think bans on so-called \u201cassault weapons\u201d work, and he also acknowledged the elimination of handguns is not likely possible.<\/p>\n

Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer at The New Yorker<\/a><\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Asked by Time editor-at-large Belinda Luscombe whether he thinks banning modern semiautomatic rifles\u2014the so-called \u201cassault weapons\u201d now the subject of an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court with oral arguments scheduled Dec. 2\u2014his reply was blunt.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo. Assault-rifle bans of the sort that have been passed and contemplated in the United States are completely pointless,\u201d Gladwell stated. \u201cThey\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Aside from Supreme Court rulings that handguns are protected by the Second Amendment\u2014which protects the right to keep and bear arms from government infringement\u2014he just doesn\u2019t believe removing them is possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s the obvious political thing that people with guns are the most motivated to fight hardest politically,\u201d he observed. \u201cThe Supreme Court currently has been captured by a majority of people who believe very strongly in gun rights. I don\u2019t know how many hundreds of millions of guns there are in America, but there\u2019s a lot. Practically speaking, I don\u2019t know how you get rid of them. No one\u2019s ever answered that. I\u2019m 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\u2019s homes to remove their guns? Very few gun-control advocates have a good answer to that question.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gladwell doesn\u2019t mention the high court rulings which say gun ownership, especially handgun<\/em> 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\u2019t make that call.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the many annoying things about the gun debate in America is the extent to which liberals roll their eyes at \u2018Guns don\u2019t kill people; people do,\u2019\u201d he told Time. \u201cI 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\u2026One 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also maintains that the so-called \u201cepidemic of gun violence\u201d often claimed by anti-gunners, is \u201can epidemic we invented.\u201d<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t think criminal activity in the U.S. is inherent, but a problem \u201cthat was brought about by a wide set of very specific choices, misapprehensions, and errors.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a proverbial nutshell, Gladwell may have unwittingly indicted the political left. They don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author, Self-Described Gun Control Proponent, Says Gun Bans Don\u2019t Work A British-Canadian journalist and self-described gun control advocate who has authored a new book being released today\u2014The American Way of Killing\u2014told Time magazine in a Sept. 22 interview that he doesn\u2019t think bans on so-called \u201cassault weapons\u201d work, and he also acknowledged the elimination of … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cluebat-o-the-day","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=119017"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119018,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119017\/revisions\/119018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=119017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=119017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=119017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}