Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is co-founder of Pushkin Industries and host of the hit podcast Revisionist History. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping…
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Malcolm goes to a shooting range in the woods of North Carolina to get a tutorial on the AR-15. It’s scary. It’s ugly. It’s at the center of the gun control debate. But what exactly makes it worse than other guns?
Malcolm Gladwell
In June of 2022, just after Memorial Day, President Biden gave the first major gun control speech of his presidency. He had just come back from Uvalde, Texas, where 21 people had been killed by a mass shooter. And 12 days before that he'd gone to Buffalo, New York where a gunman had murdered 10 people in a grocery store.
Joe Biden
At both places, we spent hours with hundreds of family members who were broken and whose lives will never be the same. They had one message for all of us. Do something. Just do something. For God's sake, do something.
I know that we can't prevent every tragedy, but here's what I believe we have to do. Here's what the overwhelming majority of American people believe we must do. Here's what the families in Buffalo and Uvalde in Texas told us we must do. We need to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Malcolm Gladwell
President Obama made the same plea. Here he is talking about the 2012 shooting in Aurora, Colorado, where a gunman with an assault rifle killed 12 people and wounded another 58.
Barack Obama
Weapons designed for the theater of war have no place in a movie theater. A majority of Americans agree with us on this. And by the way, so did Ronald Reagan, one of the staunchest defenders of the Second Amendment, who wrote to Congress in 1994 urging them, this is Ronald Reagan speaking, urging them to listen to the American public and to the law enforcement community and support a ban on the further manufacture of military-style assault weapons.
Malcolm Gladwell
Not to mention Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton went on about assault rifles so much he got sick of it.
Bill Clinton
But I'm telling you, it's amazing to me that we even have to have this debate. I mean, how long are we going to let this go on?
Malcolm Gladwell
And then Clinton concluded with something close to despair.
Bill Clinton
I'm sorry to be so frustrated, but sometimes it seems that the president's job ought to be dealing with things that are not obvious.
Malcolm Gladwell
For the past 30 years, banning assault weapons has been the rallying cry of the gun control movement. Every time a mass shooter attacks somewhere in the United States dressed in full army camo with a full-on military assault weapon slung over their shoulder, the issue comes up again. And next week or next month, when another mass shooter strikes, you will hear this speech again.
Joe Biden
A few years ago, the family of the inventor of the AR-15 said he would've been horrified to know that his design was being used to slaughter children and other innocent lives instead of being used as a military weapon in the battlefields as it was designed. That what it was designed for. Enough. Enough.
Malcolm Gladwell
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about assault rifles, the most hated gun in America. Because midway through this miniseries on gun violence, I realized that I didn't understand why this gun out of all the guns in America was the weapon that so many people wanted to ban.
There are 100 proposals out there for confronting gun violence. Should this one be at the top of the list? So I looked for someone who could give me an assault rifle tutorial. And I chose as my teacher Greg Wallace. Gun enthusiast. Competitive shooter. College professor. Hockey fan. Big friendly guy with gray hair. Author of a number of scholarly law review articles on assault weapons and their implications. And, I should point out, one of the leaders of the other side of the assault weapons battle. Which is what I wanted. Someone who would tell me things I didn't know, and, given all my predictable liberal biases, maybe things I might not want to know.
Greg Wallace and I didn't talk politics or the Second Amendment or the NRA. We just talked guns.
Greg Wallace
Close that blind over there. That sun may become... Here. I got it. I got it.
Malcolm Gladwell
The tutorial began in his office at Campbell Law School in Durham, North Carolina. Wallace put a large black nylon bag on his desk and took out the gun in question.
Greg Wallace
It is a felony to bring a firearm on an educational campus in North Carolina. But there is a nice exception for educational purposes, and I have my get-out-of-jail-free letter here from the dean.
Malcolm Gladwell
It was an AR-15, the most popular brand of assault rifle sold in the United States.
What does the AR stand for?
Greg Wallace
ArmaLite Rifle.
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh, ArmaLite, yeah.
Greg Wallace
Yeah. The company that made it.
Malcolm Gladwell
In the Second World War, American soldiers used a rifle called the M1. You've seen one I'm sure, in war movies. Long, slender, unadorned. The body of the rifle is made of walnut with a metal gun barrel poking out of one hand. An AR-15 belongs to the generation of military weapons that followed the M1, made out of metal with plastic in the stock and the hand guard. Black. Much lighter than its predecessor. Firing a less powerful, smaller bullet.
Greg Wallace
It's a trade-off. Do you go with more rounds of a perhaps less lethal, still lethal, but less so, and allow the soldier to carry more rounds? Or do you go with the larger, more lethal round, but they can't carry as many? And that's the trade-off, and the military decided to go with the smaller round.
Malcolm Gladwell
The thinking was a lighter, less powerful weapon makes less noise, produces less of a flash, so it's harder to spot on the battlefield. It has less recoil compared to, say, a shotgun. Spend an afternoon hunting with a shotgun and your shoulder will get all bruised. That gun has a savage kick. Not the AR-15, which makes it a little easier to get the gun back on target and fire off a second shot.
Can you put it on the table? You know I've never seen one of these.
Greg Wallace
Never seen one? It is unloaded. I'll double-check again. So you want to hold one? That's...
Malcolm Gladwell
It wasn't just that I'd never seen an assault rifle before. I'd never held a gun of any kind before.
When I was growing up in Canada, I don't think I even knew anyone who'd held a gun. Not to mention that the AR-15 wasn't a hunting rifle, something you shoot rabbits or deer with, which I could rationalize away. It was a weapon of war. Ugly. Unsettling.
I think Wallace was a little amused by my discomfort. He tried to reassure me. What I was holding, he said, was the civilian version of the AR-15, not the military version. They looked the same, but they were fundamentally different weapons.
So if this was an actual military AR-15, how would it differ from what I'm looking at right now?
Greg Wallace
All right. What it would do is, this is the switch here that selects fire and safe.
Malcolm Gladwell
The switch was on the side of the gun. Small, but clearly marked. Safe is locked. Fire is ready to go.
Greg Wallace
There's only two options on this because it's a semi-automatic only. So you switch it to fire and it fires one bullet for each pull of the trigger.
Malcolm Gladwell
The army's AR-15 has a different switch.
Greg Wallace
With the military weapon, it is capable of what's called selective fire, which means there would be a third option on here. One option would be full auto, which is you pull the trigger and hold it down and it fires continuously until it either runs out of ammunition or you let the trigger up. It can also fire semi-auto. There would be the semi-auto select and then there would be the safe.
Malcolm Gladwell
So that's the principle difference?
Greg Wallace
Yes. The material difference between the two is that one is a machine gun and the other is not.
Malcolm Gladwell
He showed me how to hold the gun, handle it, briefed me on its history. Then we went downstairs to his SUV and drove 40 minutes to a shooting range he belongs to. Nothing fancy. A little shed in the midst of some piney woods where you sign in. A series of long, shooting alleys scooped out of the side of a hill. We set up cardboard targets in the shape of a man's head and torso. Put on ear protection.
Greg Wallace
All right, we're going to start off with this one right here. It's a custom-built AR-15. It has the adjustable stock. It has a 14.5 inch barrel, but with this right here, this muzzle device is pinned and welded on it. So the barrel is 16 inches long. If it's not 16 inches long, if it's shorter than that, it's called a short-barrel rifle and you have to register it with the ATF and pay a $200 tax stamp. This is legal, I mean, obviously.
All right. You want to shoot it?
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah.
Greg Wallace
Okay. All right.
Let's get you comfortable on this here. So see if that works. Now what you need to do is to hold it up here, okay? All right. And then you need to lean your head over a little bit where you can see with your... You keep looking with your right eye. You want to find the red dot in there.
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh, I see the red dot.
Greg Wallace
You see it?
Malcolm Gladwell
Yep.
Greg Wallace
This time, you want to come out here and take this one up and hold it right here. Okay. Put your finger up on the side. There we go. Yep. I want you to bring your left foot forward. Get in that kind of boxing stance. There you go. There you go.
All right. Bend forward just a little bit. All right, now I'm going to take it off a safety. Now once you touch that trigger, once the safety goes off, it will fire, okay?
Malcolm Gladwell
Okay.
Greg Wallace
All right. So aim it.
Malcolm Gladwell
Good lord, that was-
Greg Wallace
What did you think about that?
Malcolm Gladwell
Jesus.
Greg Wallace
Did it kick a lot?
Malcolm Gladwell
Well, it wasn't the kick. It's just the sudden awareness of the... There's a...
Greg Wallace
Yeah, it's a surprise. I mean, it is. The very first time you do it, you get used to the sort of, what would you call, violence of it?
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah, percussive.
Greg Wallace
Yeah.
Malcolm Gladwell
My first question for Wallace was what makes an assault rifle an assault rifle? What was it that I was holding? When I fired it, it sounded like I imagined a gun would sound like. And felt just like I had imagined a gun would feel like. So what made this gun different from other guns? I thought there would be an easy answer. It turns out, there wasn't.
Greg Wallace
One of the things about the AR-15 is some people have called it the Lego of modern rifles because you can put a lot of different things on it.
Yes. So this has got a scope on it rather than just the red dot site there. It's got a scope, a one to 10 scope. It also has this red dot here that I can flip it to the side and aim it if I'm going from scope to red dot like that. It has a flashlight on it.
Malcolm Gladwell
Mmm hmmm.
Greg Wallace
And it has a little hand stop here, a little grip stuff.
Malcolm Gladwell
What he meant by that phrase the Lego of modern rifles was that the AR-15 was endlessly configurable. It's not like a Smith and Wesson six-shooter from the 19th century, or a colonial musket, or even the shotgun that your parents might've had. We all have a picture in our mind of what those guns look like.
But an AR-15 is more like a firearm platform than a specific kind of gun. Its most distinctive feature, which you can always use to spot an assault rifle, is a tube that runs along the top of the gun barrel. It's an ingenious system that redirects gases expelled from the bullet leaving the gun to reload the next bullet in the chamber. But that platform supports a virtually infinite number of add-ons and upgrades.
You can replace the gun site, in gun jargon, the optic, to let you see the target better. Replace the trigger with something that feels more comfortable. Upgrade what's called the bolt carrier, the guts of the rifle, to reduce the chance of jamming. Put a muzzle flash hider on it so the gun doesn't light up when it fires. A suppressor to reduce sound and dust.
Assault rifles can have what's called a pistol grip. When you pull the trigger, the balance of your fingers rest in the same kind of handle you would typically see on a handgun. There's also something called a forward grip dropping down from the barrel of the gun where you put your non-shooting hand. You can, if you want, keep both, have just one, or have none at all. The part of the gun, the stock, that rests against your shoulder, can be adjustable so you can fit the gun to your own dimensions. On and on and on.
So when you ban an assault rifle, what's being banned? The assumption of most people, I think, is that the gun control movement intends to ban the platform, but they don't. No one's looking to ban the distinctive gas tube reloading system. Or, more ambitiously, the category of light, easy to carry and handle semi-automatic rifles.
What is called an assault rifle ban is simply an attempt to specify which Lego pieces you are and are not allowed to add to the platform.
Even the federal ban on assault rifles, in place from 1994 to 2004, was just a ban on some of the add-ons. In that law, Congress made a short list of the most problematic modifications to the rifle platform and said you could only have one of them. The Senate bill introduced after Biden's speech makes a slightly longer list of problematic modifications and says you can't use any of them.
Now, do the Lego pieces on those lists actually make the gun more dangerous? Not really. More comfortable maybe, or easier to clean and handle. But 99% of the lethality of an assault rifle is in the platform.
When we were at the range, for example, Wallace went on at some length about another of the modifications that comes up in assault weapons discussions, magazine size.
Magazines are the rectangular metal boxes that hold ammunition. In keeping with its status as a Lego of rifles, you can go on the internet and buy any number of replacement magazines for your gun that hold 30 rounds or even 50 rounds. So one of the things that assault rifle bans tend to do is prohibit the sale of magazines that hold more than 10 bullets. The thinking is, why make things easier on the mass shooter? Make him change magazines two or three or four times.
Wallace showed me what this means in practice. He held his gun with one hand and reached for a spare magazine on his belt.
Greg Wallace
What you would do is you would have a magazine change. So let's say he's out. So he's going to do this right here and he's ready to go again. Now how long did it take to change that magazine? Just a couple of seconds.
And one of the things that the people who say, "Well, we gottta make magazine changes more often, make smaller magazines so he'll have to change more often."
If you were lying down on the ground there, could you get up and attack me in the time it took me to change that magazine? No. Probably couldn't. I mean, you probably couldn't. So I'd have you do it, but I don't want you to get to your clothes all dirty.
When you're in a closed area and people are down on the floor, it's going to be a rare situation where somebody is going to be able to jump up and subdue the shooter while he's changing a magazine.
Malcolm Gladwell
Wallace's point was that limiting magazines was the kind of thing that sounded like a good idea to people who didn't know anything about guns or who were too squeamish to think about the way mass shooters actually behaved.
Greg Wallace
And then you have mass shooters with several guns, different guns, multiple guns, and if they're done with one, they just drop it and they pick up the other one. It's about as fast as a magazine change.
Malcolm Gladwell
How is a mass shooter being deterred by this kind of legislation? And by the way, have you ever looked at the appendix to a typical assault rifle ban? Right after they catalog the shortlist of guns that will be made illegal, they run a very long list of the guns that will remain on the market. The guns you can still buy. There are hundreds and hundreds of weapons typically on the exempt list, stretching over many pages.
Let me just read to you from the appendix of the Senate assault rifle ban introduced after Biden's speech. I've chosen at random the section it deals with guns made by the Browning Arms Company of Ogden, Utah.
Browning BAR Mark II Safari Magnum Rifle
Browning BAR Mark II Safari Semi-Auto Rifle
Browning BAR Stalker Rifle
Browning High-Power Rifle
Browning LongTrac Rifle
Browning ShortTrac Rifle
But the Browning High-Power Rifle, no one has a problem with it. Same for the Browning BAR Safari Magnum Rifle.
Do you know what Browning says about the origins of their BAR rifles on their website?
"This rifle was commissioned by the US Army in an effort to break the stalemate of trench warfare in the battlefields of France and Belgium. It is considered one of the first and certainly one of the most effective of all the automatic centerfire light machine guns ever made."
This gun, perfectly legal! Why? Because it doesn't look all black and metal and menacing.
Assault rifle bans are not really prohibitions on dangerous weapons. They are attempts to wrap a small subset of dangerous weapons ever so gently in red tape.
Let's talk a little bit about the historical context of this. I'm trying to understand why, given all that you've said, all of these nuances, how does the AR-15 become such a kind of bogeyman in this gun controlled debate? How does it become so notorious? What is your interpretation of how this gun acquires such a kind of bad reputation?
Greg Wallace
There was a fellow back in the late 1980s named Josh Sugarmann at the Violence Policy Center, and one of the things that people who wanted to ban guns back in the '60s, '70s, '80s, they focused on handguns. Their call for handgun bans really never got any traction in the media or with legislators.
So he published a paper that suggested that they change policy and focus on these so-called assault weapons, and he said there were two things. He says, "Number one, we can take advantage of the public's ignorance that they are machine guns."
And even today, even today, there are a lot of people who still, like Geraldo Rivera on The Five, think that these AR-15 are fully automatic weapons. And that's a mistake. They're not.
And then he also said, and we can also take advantage of their scary looks. You know, sort of the scary black rifle kind of thing, where they're just terrifying. They communicate some kind of sinister effects.
Malcolm Gladwell
Wallace was talking about a hugely influential report that came out before the first assault rifle ban was passed in the 1990s that really put the issue on the map. I looked it up after Wallace told me about it.
Here's the conclusion, which, I have to say, astounded me.
Assault weapons, just like armor piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms, are a new topic. The weapon's menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons – anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun – can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.
The campaign against assault rifles was predicated on the assumption that most of us don't really know what an assault rifle is.
Josh Sugarmann
In 1988, as a result of an increase that we'd seen in incidents involving assault weapons, I wrote a study called Assault as Accessories in America that laid out the fact that we were seeing this new trend as far as weapons being designed and marketed by the firearms industry, and really warned that this was a dangerous new shift that we were seeing.
Malcolm Gladwell
Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Institute.
And were you one of the first voices to kind of point out the rise of assault weapons as a problem?
Josh Sugarmann
Yes. I was one of the first voices to focus on assault weapons. That really was because historically, the Violence Policy Center has tracked the gun industry, tracked their trends, tracked what their marketing, what they're developing.
Malcolm Gladwell
I called Sugarmann up right after I got back from North Carolina. His group has been at the forefront of the assault rifle ban movement since the 1990s. Strategy. Research. The thinking behind legislation. +
A few years ago, for example, his outfit published Bullet Hoses: Semiautomatic Assault Weapons. What Are They? What’s so Bad About Them?
The first chapter is a short 10-point executive summary of the group's position, and let me read to you the first four points.
1. Semi automatic assault weapons . . . are civilian versions of military assault weapons. There are virtually no significant differences between them.
2. Military assault weapons are "machine guns."
3. Civilian assault weapons are not machine guns. They are semi automatic weapons.
Okay, then comes a crucial point.
4. However, this is a distinction without a difference in terms of killing power.
Civilian semi-automatic assault weapons incorporate all of the functional design features that make assault weapons so deadly. They are arguably more deadly than military versions because most experts agree that semi-automatic fire is more accurate and thus more lethal than automatic fire.
According to one of the leading gun control advocates in the country, the assault weapons the military uses and the ones legal for civilian use are essentially identical in their killing power.
Now, I had actually asked Wallace about this when we were at the range. Could he do a simple demonstration for me? How fast could he fire his semi-automatic assault rifle, the AR-15?
Greg Wallace
I actually have... Let me make this a little more interesting. I have a timer.
Malcolm Gladwell
He clipped an electronic device to his belt.
Greg Wallace
All right. 30-round magazine.
Malcolm Gladwell
Now you're going to do this as fast as you can?
Greg Wallace
Fast as I can.
Malcolm Gladwell
Okay.
That was 30?
Greg Wallace
That was 30.
Malcolm Gladwell
Wow.
Greg Wallace
6.5 seconds.
Malcolm Gladwell
An assault rifle can fire a lot of bullets in a very short time. Then he picked up a semi-automatic handgun from his gun bag and repeated the exercise. Held the gun out with two hands, aimed at the target, fired off 10 shots as fast as he could.
Greg Wallace
All right?
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah.
Greg Wallace
See, same type of thing.
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah.
He was faster with the assault rifle, but only by a tick. Someone with a civilian semi-automatic assault rifle can't really fire any faster than someone with a handgun, which makes sense. They work with the same principle. One bullet per pull of the trigger.
But how would that compare to a military rifle in full machine gun mode? Remember Sugarmann's group said that when it comes to killing power, the semi-automatic automatic divide was a distinction without a difference.
Wallace said that if he were holding a military assault rifle, he could have fired close to 100 bullets in that same 6.5-second window.
Greg Wallace
And that's about-
Malcolm Gladwell
So you're saying that a machine gun, an automatic weapon in that same period of time could have fired an additional 70 rounds?
Greg Wallace
Yeah. Yeah, well, the rate of fire for a fully automatic weapon is about 30 rounds in two seconds.
Malcolm Gladwell
That's a big difference.
Greg Wallace
It is a big difference.
Malcolm Gladwell
Why are gun control advocates trying to pretend that these two weapons are the same? How is being able to fire 70 extra rounds in six seconds a distinction without a difference?
Yeah. Yeah. Then you have a series of points that are all about spray firing. Talk about spray firing. What do you mean by spray firing?
Back to bullet hoses and to Josh Sugarmann.
Josh Sugarmann
Spray firing means laying down an indiscriminate field of fire using the capacity and firepower of the weapon. Instead of targeting an individual, you can target an area for your offensive use of the weapon.
Malcolm Gladwell
Okay. Is spray firing associated with semi-automatic or automatic weapons?
Josh Sugarmann
Spray firing, which is a... I would not say it's a technical term, but the term is used to deal with or refer to full auto weapons.
Malcolm Gladwell
So why is it relevant here in a discussion of civilian?
Josh Sugarmann
Because you're spraying an area with rounds.
Malcolm Gladwell
But wait, I thought this was a discussion of the assault weapons that are available for civilian purchase, which are semi-automatic. So why do you have three points about spray firing when it's not relevant to civilian assault weapons?
Josh Sugarmann
I think you're kind of misreading it, to be honest with you. There are three points that we have that define-
Malcolm Gladwell
I'm going to quote you. Hold on.
"Civilian assault weapons keep the specific functional design features that make this deadly spray firing easy."
Doesn't that say that civilian assault weapons are capable of spray firing?
Josh Sugarman
Yes, it does.
Malcolm Gladwell
But you just said they're not.
Josh Sugarmann
Well, I guess you've caught me in a lack of technical-
Malcolm Gladwell
Wait, Josh, you're the one. You're trying to educate the public about assault weapons and you've just told me that I've caught you on what is a really crucial point.
Josh Sugarmann
I was actually being sarcastic.
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh, I missed that. I'm sorry. I missed the sarcasm.
I apologize. But at this point, things were getting a little testy because Sugarmann refused to own up to the game he's playing.
The public thinks that a civilian assault weapon is a machine gun, so let's make a big deal about all the nasty things that a machine gun can do and just not mention that a civilian assault weapon is actually not a machine gun and that none of the modifications on the table can turn it into a machine gun.
But how do you spray fire with a semi-automatic weapon? Don't you still have to pull the trigger for every bullet that comes out of the weapon?
Josh Sugarmann
Yes, you do.
Malcolm Gladwell
So spray firing is where you hold the gun on your hip with the finger depressed on the trigger in automatic mode, and essentially, as you say, whatever, hose down the area. But you can't do that with a civilian weapon.
Josh Sugarmann
Yes, you can. You can press the trigger as quickly as you can with your finger.
Malcolm Gladwell
But you could do that with any semi-automatic weapon.
Josh Sugarmann
That is true.
Malcolm Gladwell
So you're talking about something that's true of all semi-automatic weapons?
Josh Sugarmann
No, what I'm talking about is that there are specific design characteristics that are common to military assault weapons that are contained or present in semi-automatic versions of them that are marketed to the civilian population.
Malcolm Gladwell
At this point, Sugarmann shifted gears. What he was really worried about with civilian assault rifles, he said, was the pistol grip. He said it was the pistol grip that made it so easy to fire a civilian assault rifle so rapidly with a gun resting on your hip.
But after watching Greg Wallace at the gun range, all I could think of was, why are we so worried that someone might hold an assault rifle from their hip?
The big advantage of holding a rifle the traditional way is that you have three points of contact with the weapon.
Two hands on the weapon itself and your shoulder acting as a brace. Put your gun on your hip and you're down to two points of contact. You can't aim that well, your arm's going to get really tired because the gun is a big heavy piece of metal, and your wrist is kind of awkwardly tucked in under the gun because it's not designed to be used that way.
It's not easier to shoot an assault rifle from the hip. It's harder. I know people fire guns that way all the time in the movies, but that's the movies.
If I was an American citizen who was interested in doing something about gun violence, I would find it very difficult to follow your line of reasoning here.
You both say that these guns are functionally equivalent. Then you say, "Well, they're not functionally equivalent because one's automatic one's semi-automatic."
And then you say, "Well, actually the semi-automatic one is worse."
And then say, "And they facilitate spray firing."
But then you say, "Spray firing is really associated with the automatic version, which is not the one we're talking about."
My head is spinning. Why don't you just say what you mean?
Josh Sugarmann
Well, I think part of it is I know a lot more about guns than you do, I think. And I think you're kind of creating a word salad from some sort of... I don't know why.
Malcolm Gladwell
In the previous episode of this series, I talked about the absurdity of the stories that gun lovers tell themselves. That all of us, for our own good, need to be armed before we descend into the New York City subway. Or that an obscure English slave trader named John Knight is all that stands between us and tyranny.
This is the same kind of absurdity, only from the other side. This is someone just making stuff up in order to rile us all up and try and win a policy argument.
Now, I understand why Sugarmann's doing it. He wants to find a crack in the armor of the gun lobby, and he thinks assault rifles are his way in. And by the way, I'm completely sympathetic to the overall cause. I'm a Canadian, for goodness' sake. I don't believe anyone should have guns at all.
But this is the problem with the way we talk about guns, right? That in the middle of an ongoing national tragedy, we can't bring ourselves to have an honest conversation about guns. Both sides would rather just make things up. And if you can't have an honest conversation, how do you get anywhere?
A few years ago, a group of 10 trauma surgeons, ER docs, and pathologists sat down and read through 232 autopsy reports from 23 different American mass shootings. They sorted every victim according to the gun they were shot with: handgun, shotgun, rifle.
The group wanted to know, did the kind of weapon used by a mass shooter make a difference in the likelihood of one of their gunshot victims dying?
It wasn't a question anyone had ever asked before, maybe because the answer seemed obvious. Rifles fire bigger bullets at greater velocity than handguns. They're going to be the biggest killers. The leader of the study was the chief of the trauma center at George Washington University Hospital in Washington DC, Babak Sarani.
Babak Sarani
I thought, when we were going to do the study, I was like, "This is a slam dunk." Clearly, the rifle is the most lethal of them all, and that did not bear out.
Malcolm Gladwell
The assault rifle is not the most lethal weapon in mass shootings. Sarani's group found that more people were shot by rifles than handguns, but those differences did not translate into a higher percentage of people killed. The people most likely to die were the ones hit by handguns.
Babak Sarani
The handgun was the most lethal weapon because the person was far more likely to be shot multiple times if the assailant had a handgun as compared to a rifle. In addition, the victim was far more likely to be shot in the torso or the head if the person had a handgun than a rifle. And the reason is, I can get closer to you. So without you knowing it, by the time I'm on top of you with a handgun, high-capacity magazine and multiple clips, I can expend a significant number of rounds. And because I'm close to you, my accuracy is going up. And so I can hit you multiple times in the chest, belly, possibly the head, and you're going to die.
Whereas with a rifle, in general, you'll see me coming. You may be able to run away. That's one. Number two, when I hit you with a rifle, the velocity is so high, there's a good likelihood you're going to hit the ground, you're going to fall. And that means my accuracy just dropped for the second hit. And so people were less likely to be injured multiple times with a rifle than they were with a handgun.
Malcolm Gladwell
President Biden goes to the site of two tragic mass shootings and he's told, "For God's sake, do something."
But what he proposes to do is the same thing that presidents before him proposed to do, a law that will make no difference at all.
What's the point of that?
Americans are killing each other and themselves by the thousands. And the people who claim to be most outraged by this fact spend their time debating whether a rifle stock should or should not be adjustable, all the while pretending that they're fighting the good fight. They aren't. They're wasting our time.
Babak Sarani
If I can get close enough to you, there's absolutely no doubt, none, that a rifle is far more lethal a weapon than a handgun. It's just the practicalities getting close enough to you to shoot you multiple times kind of intervene.
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah.
Babak Sarani
And so one of the points we raised in the paper was we don't think there should be separate laws for rifles than there should be for handguns. We think there should be just common laws that apply to both types of weapons.
Malcolm Gladwell
There shouldn't be separate laws for rifles than for handguns. If we want to have an honest conversation about guns, that sentence is a good place to start.
Babak Sarani
At the end of the day, a gun is designed and a bullet is designed to kill something. Whether it's an animal for sports, whether it's a person for homicide. Whatever. The weapon's intention is to kill somebody. And they do what they're designed to do.
Malcolm Gladwell
A gun is a gun, is a gun. The rest is just foolishness.
Our Revisionist History gun series was produced by Jacob Smith, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, Kiara Powell, Tali Emlen, and Lee Mengistu. We were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton. Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz and Keishel Williams. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flawn Williams. Engineering by Nina Lawrence. Special thanks to Wilson Sayre. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
The Host
