On the surface, Tucker Carlson's takedown of a gun control advocate Tuesday night seemed a bit...well, mean.  As Carlson fired off questions, it was pretty obvious that the man, Colby Hall, a mild-mannered writer for Mediaite who argued for gun control in clichéd and emotional terms, didn't have much intellectual firepower.

>> Tucker: Last question, how many semiautomatic weapons are out there would you say right now?
>> Too many.
>> Tucker: Rough guess, how many would you say?
>> I'm going to guess too many.
>> Tucker: [Laughs] I'm going to guess you literally have no idea what you're talking about and you should write about things that you understand. Not patronize the rest of us. Probably over – that 60 million, actually. If there are 200 million high-capacity tactical magazines.
>> That's cool.
>> Tucker: I'm not saying it's cool or not cool, I'm just saying you have to deal with those facts moving forward.

Hall tried to portray himself as a reasonable man, a Kansas person, owner of a gun himself, not a gun-grabber.  Yet for all that, he wanted gun control.

But in the essay Carlson cited, Hall was also a shrill emotionalist in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre, with a weak grasp of the facts, which did not stop him from demanding "action" on gun ownership with the same dull proposals gun-grabbers have been using since the days of Sarah Brady.

Through the interview, Carlson shook out of Hall, point by point, what he was really proposing and, in so doing, clarified that gun control advocates have no answers for problems like the Las Vegas gunman.

Starting his "change" agenda, Hall said he wanted an end to bump-stocks, which enable a semi-automatic gun to shoot like an automatic one.  No argument from Carlson, given that he wouldn't want one of those things for his own gun, and the issue was unlikely to be controversial in legislation.

Then Hall said he wanted better background checks.  Here Carlson went in for the kill and didn't even use all his own intellectual ammo:

>> Tucker: Repeat it because I'm not sure I get it. Background checks that delay gun purchases for some longer period of time.
>> Deeper background check, get rid of loopholes at secondary gun market and get rid of bum stocks.
>> Tucker: A deeper background check that would look at what? What does that mean?
>> Psychological profiles. Digital footprints.
>> Tucker: That you would have a team of psychiatrists – you brought it up. Assess the person's mental state?
>> You asked me what I would do and I told you what I would do.
>> Tucker: I'm asking you to describe it.
>> Tucker, you are playing politics with an issue.
>> Tucker: I'm not playing politics! I'm asking you about policy and you haven't thought about it at all.
>> I have! I just told you three things. Dude, you're not listening.

Carlson asked him what he meant by enhanced background checks, and Hall had no idea what he meant by it.  In this, Carlson effectively highlighted that more psychiatrists (and government bureaucrats) to stop gun purchases is not the answer to a problem like Stephen Paddock, who had no known psychiatric markers that were actionable and wouldn't be deterred by government bureaucrats delaying paperwork, given that he began stockpiling his weapons in June and had no problem waiting background checks out.  The enhanced background check argument fell apart.

After that, Hall brought up the hackneyed cause of "loopholes in the secondary market" – the classic gun control advocacy argument against "gun shows."

>> Tucker: But this guy did not go to the secondary gun market that we know of are not changing the argument. Name a mass shooting that would have been stopped by these new background checks you are talking about?
>> I can't name things that didn't happen. Theoretically there are lots of shootings that probably didn't happen because of the effects of gun control. You can't prove a negative but think if there weren't background checks.

Again, score, Tucker.

One other thing Carlson won on is Hall's argument that anyone who doesn't favor these useless solutions is in favor of doing nothing.  His takedown of Hall ultimately showed that the left means to flip the argument toward those opposed to leftist "solutions," as if those solutions would always work if they were tried and only secondary concerns about "rights" were standing in the way.

>> Tucker: There have been a number of mass shootings, terrible, people died, they are corrosive of American society, I'm as against them as anybody. I'm horrified by them. You are saying there are legislative solutions out there that will prevent future shootings? I want you to name one. I'm trying to have a conversation but I'm not shrugging my shoulders, I invited you on. I'm finding it totally ignorant of the subject.
>> Program people that shrugged her shoulders and have the defeat of attitude that's extremely nihilistic and is a dystopian future that I don't want to be a part of.
>> Tucker: What I find nihilistic is one summer he jumps up and down about how we can make America better and then when asked how to do that has no answers at all.
>> I just told you what I would do.
>> Tucker: We could have some kind of background check you can't describe.
>> I'm sorry you're mad.

Tucker blew him out of the water on that one...and did a yeoman's job of shutting down the flabby, outdated gun-control arguments in the wake of a shooting that clearly did not respond to gun control.