There’s nothing that can shake your opinion of a celebrity faster than hearing their thoughts on a hot-button topic. It’s like an exciting roulette game in which the outcome doesn’t really have a profound impact on your life, but you’re still curious to see if the ball will land on red or black. Except, if the ball lands on black, you know that every time you see that ball in, say, season two of True Detective, the fact that it landed on black is going to keep gnawing at you until it’s impossible to ignore. So, is it better to not know where the wheel stops? Is it better to remain blissfully ignorant than to risk making it more difficult than it already is to enjoy watching The Internship?
Now, with all of that being said, who wants to know what Vince Vaughn thinks about gun control? Nobody? Well, too bad.
In an interview with the British version of GQ—which is just like the American version but Queen Elizabeth is in all of its luxury watch ads—Vaughn decided to announce that he supports “people having a gun in public full stop, not just in your home.” The reason he believes this is because, “we have the right to bear arms to resist the supreme power of a corrupt and abusive government. It’s not about duck hunting; it’s about the ability of the individual.” Before we move on, let’s unpack that a little bit. Vince Vaughn, a famous man who is rich and white, thinks it’s important that we have guns so the corrupt and abusive government doesn’t try to push him around. Also, it’s not about ducks, it’s about freedom.
Of course, the only thing that people who love guns like to talk about more than guns is mass shootings, and Vaughn definitely has some thoughts on those. In a statement that would demand a “citation needed” note on Wikipedia, Vaughn claims that of “all these gun shootings that have gone down in America since 1950, only one or maybe two have happened in non-gun-free zones.” Actually, we’re not sure what any of that means, but he later clarified by saying that mass shootings have “only happened in places that don’t allow guns.” His argument there seems to be that the lack of guns creates situations in which mass shootings occur, so his solution, obviously, is to introduce more guns to that environment.
Vaughn isn’t just talking about general society, though. Specifically, he thinks there should be more guns in schools, because that will scare off any potential shooters who think a school will be an easy target. Presumably, Vaughn also supports substantially raising the budget at every school in the country, because since so many of them can’t even afford art classes, they’re going to need a lot more money in order to make sure that the gun supply is locked up when not, you know, in use. Otherwise, someone entering a school with ill intent would just have a significantly easier time getting a gun, thereby making a mass shooting all the more likely. We’ll give Vaughn the benefit of the doubt and assume that he doesn’t want that to happen.
Finally, Vaughn wraps up his thoughts on guns by stating, simply, “Banning guns is like banning forks in an attempt to stop making people fat.” In other words, people will still get fat if there are no forks, just like how people will still get shot if there are no guns. Yep, that makes sense.