There's a reason I don't listen to any of the podcasts hosted by actors, musicians, and entertainers: I would rather remain blissfully ignorant of their opinions so that I can enjoy their work without the baggage of knowing their hot takes on things like gun control.
Sometimes it's impossible to escape finding out what these clueless celebrities think, though. A recent New York Post story headlined "Rainn Wilson recounts liberal friends having a ‘kind of a good riddance’ response to Charlie Kirk’s killing" drew my interest because I was curious to see how Wilson responded to those friends, and then several paragraphs in I ran across this nonsense from Wilson and actor Mark Ruffalo, who was a guest on Wilson's "Soul Boom" podcast.
Ruffalo then shifted the conversation to gun control, saying that people are walking around with “weapons of war.” He admitted that he didn’t know the exact type of gun used to kill Kirk but insisted it fell into that category.
“It was a sniper rifle, so this was planned,” Wilson interjected.
“Yeah, for nothing more than to kill human beings,” Ruffalo responded.
“That’s what these weapons are for, you know, and so when we keep signing off on that as a nation, we’re signing off on more and more of … When you keep signing off on those weapons being acceptable, you’re actually tacitly signing off on them being used on human beings as the ultimate solution … to any kind of conflict.”
Charlie Kirk's killer didn't use a "weapon of war" or a "sniper rifle", though it does appear that there was some planning involved. He allegedly used his grandfather's bolt-action hunting rifle; the very kind of rifle that gun control activists claim to be okay with.
Ruffalo could and should have stopped with "I don't know what kind of gun was used" rather than spouting off his ignorant take, and Wilson didn't need to interject with his own ignorant response. Instead, Wilson's followers were treated to two celebrities who didn't know what they were talking about acting like gun experts.
The sad thing is that before the pair veered off into their diatribe about guns, Ruffalo was actually making some sense.
“There’s no idea that if we cheer on our opponents being hurt or harmed in any way that we win as a society. And we all lose, like those — I know what his family is going through. Like, I understand that on such a personal level, and it’s a tragedy that not only the person who is killed experiences, but the entire family and community around that person.”
The actor continued, saying that although Kirk was his “political opponent,” his heart still broke for him when he learned the news of his assassination.
Wilson's objected to Ruffalo's description of Kirk as his political opponent, wondering "how can we reframe it from opponent to, you know, just someone we disagree with?”
That seems a little over the top to me, honestly. We can have political opponents without wanting to murder them. We have opponents on a football field or a pickleball court, after all, but we don't want to kill those on the other side of the line of scrimmage or the net.
I vociferously disagree with Mark Ruffalo's opinion about gun ownership and the Second Amendment, and I think it's fair to say that he and I are political opponents when it comes to Second Amendment issues. That doesn't mean I wish him any ill will. I just wish that he had the good sense to keep his uninformed opinion to himself instead of gifting the word his ignorant take on Kirk's assassination and his contempt for our Second Amendment rights.
