I’ve enjoyed several of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, though their quality has been on a definite downward slope since “The Tipping Point.” But like so, so many other relatively intelligent people who have let political bubbles and partisan bias infect their brains, Malcolm finally capitulated to the progressive mob and decided to wade into fact-infested waters he wasn’t prepared for. Too bad.

Don’t you love it when non-lawyers, especially journalists, start criticizing Supreme Court decisions that they haven’t read carefully and can’t understand? That’s Gladwell’s new, pro-gun control screed “The American Way of Killing,” released last month. American law isn’t all Gladwell doesn’t understand: he’s clueless about American culture too (Malcolm is Canadian). In this interview with TIME, he says, “There’s no reason why the United States cannot have the same level of homicide as its Western European peers. It just chose a different direction.” That statement is ignorant and delusional, but I’m not writing about his unfamiliarity with U.S. roots, culture and history here. The issue at hand is guns.

In his book, Gladwell defaults to the hoary “1619 Project”-redolent claim that the Second Amendment was designed to protect Southern slave patrols, which would be quite a surprise to the Massachusetts delegation to the Constitutional Convention. That’s dumb, but he goes beyond that to attack the SCOTUS ruling that the right to bear arms is not restricted to militias but is an individual right. Gladwell compliant is its alleged reliance on an old English case from the 17th Century. He states that Court’s conclusion that the Founders believed there was a right to bear arms for self-defense was “bananas” because it used an old obscure precedent to interpret a law in the 20th Century. What Justices should use to address legal controversies is “common sense,” the British-Canadian intellectual without a whiff of legal comprehension intones.