Bill Maher and Colion Noir, the “new face of gun culture” walk into a room—it sounds like the beginning of a corny joke, but no, it was just another episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. Indeed, on Friday night Noir, the host of NRATV’s web series NOIR, sat in Maher’s hot seat.
Maher surprisingly started off the conversation cordially with him—unfortunately setting the tone for the rest of the interview. He even offered him a faint compliment.
“I have seen your videos many times. You’re very good at what you do,” Maher said. “You kind of earn your smirk. Because people like me who don’t really like guns, we don’t know much about guns.”
Maher added there must be some “annoyances”—as in a lack of understanding—for someone like Noir, who has referred to himself as a “gun nut.”
"What are the misconceptions that bother you the most?” Maher inquired.
“Well there are two dynamics, right? There’s the actual physical component of the gun and then the individuals,’” he said. Noir continued to explain that a “vast majority” of guns are semi-automatic.
“So, that’s stuff you would learn after you follow the rabbit down the hole,” he said.
Maher asked: “So semiautomatic, you pull the trigger once?”
“You pull the trigger once, you get one bullet,” Noir said.
In an attempt to buddy-up with Noir, who is also an attorney, Maher asked about the “AR-15” saying “they’re obsessed” with it. Noir explained that AR does not stand for “assault riffle” and that that is a common misconception.
“So why do people think, liberals—let’s be honest—why do they think that getting rid of the AR-15 would go so far to solving this problem, and tell me why it wouldn’t,” Maher said.
Noir began his explanation by telling Maher that “optics are everything,” and in general, there is a certain “reaction” that comes with guns. He added that most people see guns only from movies, in which these are held by "bad" guys.
“You see them in reality and think ‘oh my god’ I don’t want those things near me or in the streets,” Noir said. He added that the “knowledge base” for “liberals” is not very “high,” so they start “feeling.”
“There’s a lot of hypocrisy there. If guns aren’t so popular, why do they dominate movies as much as they do?” Maher asked.
Noir said, “there’s a fascination there, too.”
Noir continued to resort to a traditional NRA talking point: self-defense.
“If there’s ever a moment I have to defend my life, I want to be in a position to do absolutely anything possible I can to make sure I get out of there alive,” he said.
Maher asked Noir what he proposes the solution be though, adding that we aren’t living in the Wild West, where we’re “all strapped all the time.”
“But we are,” Noir said.
“Not me,” Maher responded.
Maher then asked if Noir thought teachers should be armed, to which Noir unsurprisingly said he didn’t have a problem with.
“This is where the NRA loses me,” Maher said.
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