Honestly with Bari Weiss · The Free Press

Would America Be Safer Without the Second Amendment?

November 25, 2025·1 hr 8 min·4 clips

Alan Dershowitz admits the Bill of Rights makes America less safe — and says that's exactly the point.

The constitutional text comes first. The host reads the Second Amendment aloud, then pauses over the words that still set off the argument: well-regulated, militia, keep and bear arms. The question is not theoretical. Guns are treated as tools of violence and symbols of a specific American freedom, which makes the cost of that freedom hard to slide past. Mass shootings sit behind the whole conversation. So do families torn apart by gun violence, because the debate keeps circling back to what the country thinks it is protecting. The explanation is where things get tense. One side argues that America cannot explain its gun deaths without treating guns as the obvious difference. The other side pushes back. The counterargument turns instead to restorative justice, judicial rot, and criminal justice reform as causes of violence. The pressure rises fast. A 2022 argument attributed to Alan is used to press the idea that blaming only bad people means America must have more bad people. That premise gets challenged. The reply rejects the idea that Americans are simply worse, then points to restorative justice as part of a larger judicial rot. Scandinavia becomes the stress test. If criminal justice reform exists there without the same gun violence, the explanation needs to do more work. International comparisons keep coming in. Norway in 2011, Paris in 2015, and Israel are used to argue over what counts as a mass shooting and how terrorism changes the math. The numbers matter. The exchange cites rates of 3.2 per 100,000, 5.5 per 100,000, and 15.8 per 100,000 to show how definitions shift the comparison. No one gets to leave with a clean answer. The episode works best when constitutional meaning, public safety, and the moral burden of explaining American gun violence all collide.

As heard by us

A serious gun debate episode that treats the Second Amendment as a question, not a slogan.

This episode treats the Second Amendment as a live question about what America is protecting when guns sit inside ordinary life and mass shootings keep happening.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a serious argument about the Second Amendment, its limits, and what American gun violence means today, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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