Ten years ago, Bill Maher said the Second Amendment was "bulls***", but now the HBO host says his views on guns and gun ownership have "evolved". 

Maher made the comments during a discussion with comedian Larry Wilmore this week, offering up guns as the biggest example of something where his position has changed over the years.

WILMORE: Really?

MAHER: Yeah. I would say before, like I would just swallow what the, you know, boilerplate of the left was about guns. I think I have a much more nuanced view of it, and I also think that it's something that isn't, look, we have a gun problem in this country, no doubt about it, but the problem of mass shootings and so forth is a problem not just of too many guns, but other things.

And to think that you can change it with just getting rid of guns, which you could never do, this is the gun country, it's the one country that has a Second Amendment, you could never take the guns away from all the people who have them. Right. This is what they go more bananas about than anything.

WILMORE: It's a country of Elmer Fudds, yeah.

I'm pretty sure Wilmore's still aligned with Maher's position circa 2013. But Maher himself didn't accept Wilmore's characterization of gun owners as Fudds. Instead, he reminded the comedian that it's not just bald dudes in ballcaps like yours truly who embrace their right to keep and bear arms.  

MAHER: Right. But it's also a leveler. Yeah. You know, I mean, for women, for people in bad neighborhoods, I think it's very elitist to tell them you can't have a gun in places where the police don't show up right away.

They'll show up in my neighborhood pretty quickly, but a lot of other people, not quite as quickly, and so I would say that, and also I realized when I was first talking about it, I didn't know anything about them, and liberals very often talk about guns, and they just don't know. I know a lot of people who thought like AR, the AR-15, they thought that stood for Automatic Rifle, AR. And just the little things like that, that if you don't know what you're talking about, maybe you shouldn't talk about it, or learn something first. So I would say that is an issue, yes, where I got more educated and had a different view on it. Yeah. Not that I'm a gun nut. I don't like guns. I always compare them to antibiotics. I never want to use them, but I'm glad they exist in the world. 

The key part of Maher's statement is that his position changed as he got more educated on the subject. Sometimes it can feel like we're beating our head against a brick wall when we talk to gun control advocates or folks who have just embraced the idea that we have to "do something" about guns in order to deal with violent crime, suicide, or mental illness. It's rare to have a conversation or debate with someone that leads to a lightbulb going off over their head and an instantaneous change in their position, but that doesn't mean that attitudes and opinions can't and don't change over time. 

I've never been a huge fan of Maher, but I've always respected that he's not afraid to talk to people he disagrees with. The fact that he's been open-minded enough to actually listen to what they have to say is another point in his favor. Maher may not be a "gun nut", but he's at least savvy enough to understand that in a nation with 400 million firearms, 80-to-100 million gun owners, and the constitutionally protected right to keep and bear them we're never going to be a "gun-free" society. And even with his personal distaste for firearms, Maher recognizes that guns are a positive good for those of us who can't rely on armed bodyguards or a quick police response. Considering his previous distaste for the Second Amendment, I'd say that's an impressive shift toward real common sense on the issue of guns and gun control.