No one is about to mistake Bill Maher for a conservative any time soon. He’s a liberal and he knows it, he embraces it, and he doesn’t back down from it.

However, he’s also someone who isn’t afraid to call his own side out for their BS when they start spreading it. In this video, he does that quite a bit. I urge you to watch the whole thing as he moderates between rapper Killer Mike and Robert Reich.

Now, while I disagree with Killer Mike that black America is living in a tyranny, it does bring up an excellent point, one that Maher touches on as well. That point is if tyranny is either coming or here, why should anyone give up their guns? If you’re convinced the police and the government are so awful, why are they the only ones who should have guns?

Killer Mike actually presents what is, I think, a solid case for progressives to oppose gun control.

As S.H. Blannelberry notes over at Guns America:

The 2A is not about hunting.  It’s about keeping tyranny in check.  Maher gets this.  And he is wondering why more Lefties aren’t catching on given that their version of the antichrist is in the White House.

“But when you talk about tyranny… I’ve been saying for a long time that Donald Trump is bringing fascism to this country. Madeleine Albright wrote an op-ed in the New York Times a few weeks ago saying the same thing. She said fascism is coming,” said Maher.

“Okay. The shoe’s on the other foot now. If you really believe that Donald Trump is an authoritarian leader capable of using force to suppress the opposition I wonder if liberals are going to be rethinking their feelings about guns a little bit,” he added.

It’s true.  If you really believe that the Trump era is going to be the end of America and we’ll be killing each other in the streets or fighting off government jackboots trying to strip away our rights then why the heck aren’t you doing all you can right now to prepare for it?

And suppose that is the case, why would you ever support banning “military style” weapons?  Wouldn’t you want to fight fire with fire?

It’s a fair question, and Reich’s response about the “rule of law” is obscene in its stupidity.

Look, I like the rule of law. I like that I can check my mail without necessarily needing to armor up like I’m going on patrol in Iraq at the height of the fighting there. The rule of law is a good thing.

But if tyranny is coming in the form of a supposedly fascist Donald Trump, only a fool would also go out of their way to make sure no one has an effective means of resisting that tyranny.

Tyrants tend to want a disarmed populace. If you believe for one moment that the president is a tyrant in the making, only blind stupidity would say, “You know what? I think this guy is a tyrant who wants to put large portions of our population in camps and bring back the gas chambers of Nazi Germany. Let’s make it so the government that serves him are the only people who can have these military-style rifles.”

In fact, I’d argue that Trump’s resistance to gun control is the truest measure that for all his faults, he’s not a fascist dictator in the making.

The fact is, though, that if the rule of law says to round up all the Jews, the Hispanics, the blacks, or anyone, then my appreciation for the rule of law ends. The rule of law is immoral and it’s no longer time for the rule of law. It’s time for honest men and women to stand up and oppose tyranny, plain and simple.

Claiming that the rule of law should be held to in the face of tyranny isn’t principle. It’s moral cowardice being used to justify their own unbalanced fear, plain and simple.