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Fareed Zakaria GPS

Trump Cozies Up to Putin, Europe Weighs What It Can Do for Ukraine; High Expectations for Democrats in Midterm Elections; Israel to Hold First National Election Since October 7th Attacks. Interview With RAND Distinguished Chair for Israel Policy Shira Efron; Interview With Author Malcolm Gladwell. Aired 10-11a ET

Aired October 25, 2026 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[10:00:30]

FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR: This is GPS, the GLOBAL PUBLIC SQUARE.

Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria coming to you from New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: Today on the program, the United States seems to be negotiating with Russia and pressuring Ukraine. How will Europe, now Ukraine's main benefactor, respond? I'll talk to Poland's deputy prime minister, Radek Sikorski.

Then onto important upcoming elections.

First up, could Democrats take the U.S. House and Senate? I'll ask the master statistician, Nate Silver, what he sees when he looks at the numbers.

Then Israel's parliamentary elections on Tuesday could take down Benjamin Netanyahu. What difference might a new leader make for Israel but also the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank? I'll speak with an expert from Israel.

Finally, Malcolm Gladwell. He has looked at America's gun problem in a way only he can.

MALCOLM GLADWELL, AUTHOR, "THE AMERICAN WAY OF KILLING": It's crazy.

ZAKARIA: And he has some interesting solutions.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ZAKARIA: But first, here's "My Take."

Elon Musk picked the wrong moment to lecture Indians. Frustrated that Starlink had not been cleared to launch in that country, he accused the government of protecting Mukesh Ambani, whose telecom network Jio will launch its own satellite service. Musk cast himself as the champion of ordinary Indians against one of the country's richest men. It backfired. India's government dismissed his accusation as baseless.

An influential nationalist group close to the ruling party went further, demanding that Starlink be kept out of India altogether, citing national security. Media and online reactions were similarly hostile to Starlink.

Musk did not understand that in India, as in much of the world, trust in America is collapsing. Indians have watched as Donald Trump has discarded 25 years of bipartisan outreach to New Delhi in favor of cozying up to Pakistan and its de facto dictator, Field Marshal Asim Munir. They have watched Trump essentially abandon Ukraine, where the military version of Starlink has been suspiciously restricted, thus crippling Ukraine's military response to Russian aggression.

Were India to find itself in another crisis with Pakistan, would it want its armed forces to be utterly dependent on a U.S. satellite system controlled by Trump and Musk?

After World War II, the United States pulled off something close to a geopolitical miracle. Japan and Germany became the second and third most powerful economies on earth. Yet neither sought nuclear weapons nor the ability to defend itself alone. They align their security policy with Washington and entrusted their ultimate defense to American soldiers and American nuclear weapons.

Think how strange that arrangement was. Great powers throughout history have acquired armies to counter the top dog. Yet America's allies agreed to depend on it for their survival. They did so not because America was invariably wise or generous, but because the entire international system thus created benefited the U.S., too. American power was formidable. But American trust was priceless.

That trust is disappearing. A Pew Research Center survey conducted this year found that in 26 of 35 countries, China was viewed more favorably than the United States.

Look at Canada. Mark Carney has visited Beijing to rebuild commercial ties and moved to bind Canada more closely to Europe, including through European defense financing. His efforts to loosen the dependence on America have earned his government sky-high approval ratings, even as many Western governments face populations deeply unhappy with their rule.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other American partners have suffered Iranian attacks in a war Washington initiated.

[10:05:03]

Trump has not helped Saudi Arabia or Qatar directly, despite his recent commitments to both, suggesting he would do just that.

Some analysts there have begun asking whether hosting American military bases makes them safer or puts them in danger. In August, Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defense pact with Turkey and the nuclear armed Pakistan. In South Korea, the share of people who have favorable views of the

U.S. has fallen from 77 percent in 2024 to 45 percent this year. In Japan, the number has fallen from 70 percent in 2024 to just half. These societies still fear China and North Korea and still depend on the U.S.. That is precisely the point. They need Washington, but no longer know whether they can trust it.

In Europe, Trump has repeatedly questioned whether he would defend NATO allies. Europeans have responded by boosting military spending, strengthening their own weapons industries, and seeking greater strategic independence. France and Germany have even created a joint group to discuss nuclear deterrence and France's arsenal. They insist that this is meant to reinforce NATO, not replace it. But the very discussion tells us how much has changed.

Trump's defenders say he's simply forcing wealthy allies to pay for their own defense, something previous presidents also demanded. Fair enough. But there is an enormous difference between asking your allies to shoulder more responsibility and telling them that your promise to defend them might be worthless.

The ultimate danger lies in nuclear weapons. In 1963, John F. Kennedy warned that the world might have 15 or 20 nuclear powers by 1975. More than eight decades after Hiroshima, however, there are only nine. Arms control treaties mattered, but more crucial was the American nuclear umbrella, which spared countries such as Germany, Japan and South Korea, the need to develop their own bombs.

That restraint is already weakening. An August survey found that 65 percent of South Koreans support acquiring nuclear weapons. A recent "Washington Post" report indicated that Saudi Arabia hasn't ruled out pursuing them.

As trust in America weakens further, other wealthy nations will make the same calculation. And then we will move into a world of dozens of nuclear nations with all the uncertainty and danger that that brings.

Donald Trump believes he is making America's allies pay their own bills. He may end up making them build their own bombs.

Go to FareedZakaria.com for a link to my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started.

The week began with President Trump telling reporters Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. The day before he vilified Ukraine's president on social media, saying Zelenskyy doesn't want to end this war and probably never did. As for Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, he met with both President Zelenskyy and President Putin this week and called President Putin a humanitarian.

To try to help us understand all of this, let us get the view from Ukraine's neighbor to the northwest, Poland. I am joined by that country's deputy prime minister, Radek Sikorski.

Welcome. Radek, tell us what your reaction was when you watched what seems to be a fairly significant shift in the United States, which is now openly saying that Russia is doing more for peace than Ukraine.

RADOSLAW SIKORSKI, POLISH DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER: Well, in Poland and Europe in general, we consistently think that to end the war, you need to put more pressure on the aggressor, which is to say Vladimir Putin, and not on the victim of aggression, because, of course, you can end every war by capitulating. But conditions of ending the war matter and Ukraine has to end this conflict with defensible borders and the kind of country to which people will want to return.

ZAKARIA: Does Europe have a strategy, a viable strategy, if the United States goes down this path, which seems to be less intelligence sharing, occasional curbing of the Starlink and Starshield? You know, is there a path for Europe -- you're not getting some of the weapons that you paid for from Washington. They're delaying the sale of them.

[10:10:03]

SIKORSKI: Remember that the United States has not been funding Ukraine since January last year. We fought the entire bill for sustaining the Ukrainian state and for weapons deliveries and for weapons production in Ukraine's vibrant defense industry. It also turns out that the frozen Russian assets are a card, and we have 22 packages of sanctions on Russia, the biggest of which is that Russia has lost its most lucrative market for oil and gas, which is Europe itself.

If you watch the U.N. Security Council couple of weeks ago, Sergey Lavrov's rant against Europe suggested to me that they are beginning to realize that Europe is a factor, both financially and in terms of security. And we demand a voice in how this ends.

ZAKARIA: People wonder whether Russia has aspirations beyond Ukraine. And many say they don't. And President Putin has sometimes said that. But you have pointed out that Russia is already waging a hybrid war of sorts against Poland and other European countries. Describe what you mean.

SIKORSKI: Well, hybrid war is attacks just below the threshold of an actual armed invasion. But it's kinetic OK and people are dying. We've had assassinations in Poland, in Britain, in Germany, elsewhere. We've had arsons. We've had an attempted blowing up of a train on a high escarpment which wasn't the derailed, only thanks to the incompetence of the terrorists. We've had armed drones traversing Lithuania and being used at Leipzig Airport.

We are a target daily of cyberattacks on our hospitals or on our financial system, on our energy system. We have incursions of drones. We had a Russian cruise missile exploding in Poland, which is to say, with a warhead. Plus the usual espionage and the mapping of critical infrastructure on the sea.

This is -- it's constant. And we know which particular unit of GRU is doing it. And we know that they are trying -- that they are planning to escalate.

ZAKARIA: Shouldn't Europe respond more forcefully to these what appear to be kind of Russian probes? SIKORSKI: We don't do the kinds of things that the Russians do. You

know, we don't have departments of wet affairs, as they call them, which is to say assassination squads. We don't send drones or terrorists into Russia because we are peaceful democracies. We would like ourselves and Ukraine to be just left alone and for Russia to fulfill its security guarantees to Ukraine given both in the Budapest memorandum and in the bilateral border treaty. We think that our best response to Russian provocations is more help for Ukraine.

ZAKARIA: Radek Sikorski, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you, sir.

SIKORSKI: Thank you.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, we are just over a week away from the U.S. elections. Will Democrats take control of both Houses of Congress? I will talk to the great election forecaster, Nate Silver.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:18:21]

ZAKARIA: Early voting is underway across the United States in this year's midterm elections. There's a growing sense Democrats will not only retake the House, but could win the Senate, too. Is that overconfidence or is it backed by reliable polling?

Joining me is the statistician and election forecaster Nate Silver, who has a Substack called "Silver Bulletin."

Nate, pleasure to have you on. And you've been very vocal on the issue. Your model at this point says the Democrats have about a 75 percent, 76 percent chance of winning the Senate and a 95 percent chance of winning the House. But what you say is that the data actually should point everyone in that direction, and everyone is being hesitant because they have been burned in the past. Explain that.

NATE SILVER, STATISTICIAN AND ELECTION FORECASTER: Yes. Look, if you take a step back and think about what are the background conditions in this election, you have gas at $4.30 a gallon. You have a president with a 37 percent approval rating. You have a long history of the president's party doing poorly at midterms, including in 2018 when under President Trump the GOP lost 41 seats in the House. You've seen high turnout in Democratic primaries all year.

We can talk about the early voting data, too. You know, the hard place versus the rock, I guess, is that two in the Senate Democrats have to win in some states that President Trump carried by double digits in 2024. So that's why in the House, the polling would have to be very wrong, more wrong than 2016 for Democrats to fail to win the House.

[10:20:01]

But the Senate, everyone is trying to guess, will this wave be big enough to inundate red states like Texas, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, Alaska? ZAKARIA: But the reason people are being hesitant because, you're

right, when you look at the polls, these are narrow margins, sometimes within the margin of error. But the Democrats are leading in the states they would need to take the Senate. But what makes everyone worried is in '16, in '20 and '24 polls underestimated Trump's support. And you say they should have adjusted, but shouldn't they have adjusted after '16?

Like obviously there is some almost inherent problem in the way the polling is done where you end up with a bunch of shy Trump voters who don't reveal their preferences. Is that fair?

SILVER: I don't think it's fair to assume they'll be shy Ken Paxton voters or shy Roger Marshall voters. Republicans did not beat their polling in 2018 or 2022. The midterm polling was quite unbiased. And in the most recent statewide elections in 2025, Democrats did much better than their polling in New Jersey and Virginia, beating their polling averages by five to nine points.

So the question is whether pollsters are making an extrapolation from a high turnout election when Trump himself is on the ballot to a medium turnout election where he's not. You know, I think the early voting data so far suggests that Democrats are turning out irregular voters. Republicans haven't yet.

The young men that voted for Trump in 2024 probably haven't voted in this election yet. They may by November 3rd. But it seems like if you're going to fit based on recent precedent, that you ought to give at least as much weight to the midterms, where you had some problems in state by state polling, but you didn't have this systematic presidential year polling bias.

ZAKARIA: You looked at the issue of gerrymandering, and you said it probably, again, based on current polling, gives the Republicans a very small advantage. There is also a possibility that if there is this stronger-than-expected Democratic wave you could end up with the gerrymandering actually backfiring and hurting Republicans. Explain why.

SILVER: So in Florida, Governor DeSantis drew a map that was kind of designed for a presidential type election year where, you know, we know now in presidential years that Republicans win Florida by seven, eight, 10, 12 points. If you were to have a blue climate where Florida is only slightly Republican, then a lot of safe R seats become lean R seats and the lean Rs become tossups.

Meanwhile, in Texas, Republicans, the whole reason why Trump urged Texans to redistrict was because they felt they had locked in permanent gains among working class Hispanic voters in south Texas and west Texas. There are signs in the polls that those are reversing, too. And if that's true, then the gerrymander is neutered in Texas for the most part.

I should say Supreme Court decisions weakening the Voting Rights Act in states like Tennessee and Alabama and Louisiana, that is worth three or four seats for the GOP. But these seats weren't really designed to withstand a D plus nine or D plus 10 climate or something like that.

ZAKARIA: Which is where we are now. And when you look at this election, do you -- is it fair to say if you were -- if somebody were to say to you, point to the two big numbers that you should look at, one would be the generic ballot where the Democrats are leading by a lot, you know, nine, 10, 11, depending on what you look at, and the other is the president's approval rating.

And CNN's own Harry Enten has founded it is the lowest approval rating for any president before midterm election, worse than Harry Truman in '46, worse than Bush in '06. And in both cases, of course, that party lost both the House and the Senate.

SILVER: Yes. And look, the third number I looked at is gas prices. So what if you had another tick up in gas prices before election day that would, you know, anytime you see has a gas station, it's an advertisement for Democrats basically.

ZAKARIA: Nate Silver, thank you. That makes us all so much smarter. Appreciate it.

SILVER: Thank you, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, Israelis will vote on Tuesday in their first national election since the October 7th attacks. I'll ask an expert about the main man who is challenging Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right coalition. Could he unseat Bibi? That's up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:29:07]

ZAKARIA: On Tuesday, Israelis will head to the polls for the country's first national election since the October 7th attacks that so profoundly changed Israel more than three years ago. The leading rival to right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a more centrist former military chief, Gadi Eisenkot. And while topics like the economy and October 7th have featured prominently in the campaign, you may be surprised to hear that issues like the future of Gaza and Israel's decades long occupation of the West Bank have received relatively little attention.

For more, I'm joined by Shira Efron, who is the distinguished Israel policy chair at the think tank RAND. Shira joins us from Tel Aviv.

Tell us about Gadi Eisenkot. How should we think about him if he were to become the new prime minister?

[10:30:00]

SHIRA EFRON, DISTINGUISHED CHAIR FOR ISRAEL POLICY, RAND: So full disclosure, I know Gadi Eisenkot and I have tremendous respect for him. And I think what's interesting is he's almost the negative image to Netanyahu. He's not polished. His English is not great. He doesn't go off this, you know, shining charisma, American raised and educated in MIT. But he's very cerebral, very level headed, is considerate, extremely strategic -- strategic thinker. And he has shown as the chief of staff that he can be very aggressive with the use of force.

He coined the Dahiya doctrine, meaning that we would use extensive force to attack even civilian areas from which attacks on Israel imminent. And he's quite modest, I must admit. He listens to experts and he values expertise of others. Israel would likely be in good hands if he has a key position in the next government.

ZAKARIA: So, what does that mean? Because when I looked at -- I watched a television debate with a bunch of the leaders of the various parties, and they were asked, do you favor in any shape or form, in any sequence and any timetable, a Palestinian state? And pretty much everyone said no.

In fact, the only thing that happened was Bibi Netanyahu was attacked because 10 or 15 years ago in his Bar-Ilan speech, he had come out for a Palestinian state. So he's on the left on that -- on the Israeli spectrum right now.

EFRON: Right. When you don't know what's left and what's right anymore. You're correct. They're all trying to outflank Netanyahu from the right. But this means more about what they think gets them votes rather than what they're going to do if they actually are elected and have power.

There is not going to be a breakthrough to a two-state solution. No one is prepared to even think about extended Palestinian sovereignty at the moment because of October 7th and because of decades of policy that really got us away from there.

And we have to understand that what this government, the Netanyahu government, did on territorial measures and bureaucratic measures and economic measures to try to topple the Palestinian authority, some of them -- some of them can be undone, with the stroke of a pen, but some of them cannot be.

On the other hand, and I think this is where the positive is that the lives of individual Palestinians can improve because the current government has really sought to make the lives of Palestinians as a policy, explicit policy, to make the lives of individual Palestinians so miserable as we're seeing with the settler violence and economic measures and limitations on movement across the West Bank so that they leave.

ZAKARIA: But if you have a situation where everybody feels in order to get votes, they have to say that they are unalterably opposed to any kind of Palestinian state on any timetable. Surely that's a constraint on -- you once your governing, because, you know, Israel is a democracy.

These politicians are going to go back to the polls. They're not going to do something. Are they going to do something, I should ask, as a question which they know the public is opposed to.

EFRON: No one in the current Israeli realm and this even goes to Yair Golan, who represents the Democrat's party, the traditional Israeli left is speaking about a two-state solution in the immediate term. So, the pressure to deliver a state, except for pressures from external -- Israel's external friends is not really there.

And it is true that they're vowing not to establish a Palestinian state. And the Israeli public is against a two-state solution. But do you know what the Israeli public is more against? And you see this in every in every poll, a one state solution.

There is a sense of wanting to separate from the Palestinians. And so, you know, it's not the whole gamut. It's not the full enchilada. But sometimes you need to start by starting and maybe measures that keep the door open for some sort of diplomatic resolution in the future is better definitely than the current trajectory that really seeks to either expel the Palestinians -- the Palestinians, fight with them and ensure that they have no viable future in this land.

ZAKARIA: Shira, thank you so much. That really was a very enlightening set of comments. Thank you.

EFRON: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, the bestselling author, Malcolm Gladwell offers some surprising solutions to America's gun problem.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[10:39:27]

ZAKARIA: Few issues in America are as deeply divisive or consequential as gun violence. Every day nearly 130 Americans die by firearms, and almost twice as many are shot and wounded. Just last week, a tragic record was set when a five-year-old became the youngest child ever killed in a school shooting.

The U.S. gun homicide rate is 26 times higher than that of other high income countries, according to 2022 data. There have been countless thoughts and prayers offered, but the problem remains out of control.

[10:40:02]

The bestselling author, Malcolm Gladwell, takes on the issue in his new book, "The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic." He joins me now.

Malcolm, welcome. I mean, those statistics about the American comparison with other high income countries are kind of like abstract, but you point out you grew up in Canada, right next door, very similar culture. Even in places like Alberts kind of wild west culture, but a dramatically lower gun death rate.

MALCOLM GLADWELL, AUTHOR, "THE AMERICAN WAY OF KILLING": It's one of the reasons I wanted to write the book. Ever since moving to America, I have been puzzled by this fact. You know, to grow up next door, 50 miles from the border and to have a completely different relationship with violence, just by virtue of the fact that I'm on the other side of -- just north of the line. I've never kind of fully understood why you could have two countries so similar in so many respects and yet so different in this one crucial respect.

ZAKARIA: And so you started looking at it and you point out something that I have to confess, I've spent a lot of time on the gun issue. I didn't completely understand to the extent that you made it clear, the origins of the Second Amendment and the tie to slavery.

GLADWELL: OK. There's a really powerful argument made by a historian named Carl Bogus, who wrote this brilliant book on this. He points out that when -- in the Second Amendment, when they're referring to militia, when Madison refers to a militia, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the defense of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. What is he referring to in militia?

We've often thought that that was a reflection of the role of the militias in the revolutionary war. Bogus says, no, no, no, no. If you look very closely at what happened when Virginia, in particular, was ratifying -- was debating whether to ratify the constitution in the 1780s. They all meet in Richmond for, you know, three weeks, and they have -- Virginia is the crucial state.

If Virginia doesn't ratify the constitution, there is no United States of America, right? And if you look -- we have full transcripts of the three weeks of debates that take place in Richmond. What are they arguing about? They're arguing about -- they think that the constitution is written, will take away their right to form militias.

And what do they use militias for? They're slave patrols. They're -- you know, if you go out into the countryside in Virginia, slaves outnumber, you know, white people, 20 to one in some cases. The only way they can keep order is they have these militias of armed men. And the Virginians, look at this, and they say, you're going to -- the north is going to take away our slave patrols. We won't be able to survive.

So Madison, himself a Virginian, writes an amendment which effectively means this -- a well-regulated slave patrol being necessary to the defense of a state like Virginia --

ZAKARIA: Yes.

GLADWELL: -- the right of people like me and my peers to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

ZAKARIA: It is true, though, that the courts used to interpret this much more loosely, and in the 30s you had lots of, you know, for a long time you had lots of regulation that changed it. But sort of we are where we are now. So given the Second Amendment, we are where we are.

The issue is, is there a is there a better way to, you know, to reduce these numbers? Given where we are and you point out, which will be controversial, a bunch of what you say is controversial on the right, this would be controversial on the left. We are under-policed --

GLADWELL: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- as a society, particularly in our big cities. Explain what you mean.

GLADWELL: So if you -- I give the example in the book of Berlin and Los Angeles, which are the same size, both wealthy cosmopolitan places. Same size in terms of population.

Los Angeles has 8,500 police officers on a good day. And when I was doing the book, I polled 100 people roughly and asked them, L.A. -- Berlin is same size. L.A. has 8,500 police officers. How many officers do you think Berlin has? And 98 of the 100 responses were 2,000, 3,000, 4,000.

ZAKARIA: Lower, right?

GLADWELL: Lower. The right answer, 18,000. European cities, in general -- you know, on average, have twice the police officers per capita as American cities. Europeans come here, European police chiefs, and they say, what are you guys doing? You're violence problem is way worse than ours. And you're trying to deal with it with police departments that are half the size. It's crazy.

You know, another way to think about it is, you know, European countries and the United States spend the same share of GDP on public safety. But we spend this much on prisons and this much on police, and they spend this much on police and this much on prisons. It's a complete reversion. And I think that once you explain that to people, nobody thinks our way of doing it is better.

ZAKARIA: And we add another thing I'd say in that money statistic, you look at the NYPD, it looks like the army.

[10:45:04]

The amount of money you spend on firepower. And, you know, you go to Europe and -- I think you're right. They probably have more community police officers --

GLADWELL: Exactly.

ZAKARIA: -- who kind of go into the neighborhoods.

GLADWELL: Having more -- the crucial thing is, and I talked to -- I had a fascinating conversation for the book with a police chief named Daniel Oates, a big city police chief for many years. And his point was, if you gave me more police, which I would dearly love to have, I would do different things with those police.

It's not more of the same. It's having -- knowing what's going on in the community, having relationships with local community leaders. It's knowing what's going on in the schools. You know, criminal -- crime -- violent crime, in particular, starts -- you first catch wind of the people who are going down that path.

In high school you got to know what's going on in high schools. He would love, he said, to have two police officers assigned in the building, but assigned to understand what's going on in each high school, in his community, just so he can stop, understand who's at risk, talk to people, talk to their families, steer them away. He says there's no way he had the staff to do that. And that's what we're missing.

And, you know, the police in this country are -- you know, they are more violent and aggressive than police in other countries. But that is a function of the fact that they are -- they are undermanned. It's not a function of the fact that they are numerous, right? When you're numerous, you don't have to project power in that same way.

ZAKARIA: When we come back, would banning assault weapons solve America's gun problem? I'll ask Malcolm Gladwell.

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[10:51:17]

ZAKARIA: Back now with the bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell talking about his new book, "The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic."

So, we get to the -- one of the things that I think I disagree with you on where you say that the assault -- you know, because the question is what to do about this. You say stuff like the assault weapon ban is pointless. And, you know -- and I just feel like, you know, the assault weapon ban when it was written had like literally 350 or maybe 600 loopholes, which allowed a whole bunch of weapons to go through.

But even that ban, the data seems to show -- there's a Stanford professor -- John Donohue says, compared with the decade before the federal assault weapon ban was associated with a 25 percent drop in gun massacres and a 40 percent drop in fatalities. It seems to me the fatalities is the key, because the issue is how large the magazine is, means how often do you have to reload?

GLADWELL: Yes.

ZAKARIA: How many people can you kill continuously in one swoop the way, you know, they were able to do in --

GLADWELL: Yes.

ZAKARIA: -- many of the school shootings?

GLADWELL: Yes. I'm not impressed by that study. He's making an association not a -- not a --

ZAKARIA: But all you can make is correlations.

GLADWELL: And also, more importantly, you know, when you look at the large universe of mass shootings, first of all, you realize more people are killed by handguns in mass shootings than by rifles.

Secondly, there is nothing -- assault rifle bans don't ban assault rifles. That's another thing. So, it's not like we're preventing -- would be mass shooters from bringing high powered rifles into. In fact, at the end of every assault rifle ban, there is a -- typically an appendix, 50 pages or more, listing all the high powered rifles not covered by the ban.

ZAKARIA: Right, right.

GLADWELL: All the bands do is limit the number and a variety of cosmetic attachments you can buy on the internet to attach to your rifle.

ZAKARIA: But isn't that an argument for not having all those exceptions?

GLADWELL: Well, it's an argument for realizing that the problem is guns and not trying to --

ZAKARIA: Right.

GLADWELL: -- slice off a particular category. I mean, they -- you have a -- calling assault rifle ban bans is a misnomer. They don't ban.

ZAKARIA: I mean, it seems to me your example of -- that Canada is the perfect example where, you know, it's not -- it can't be that we're particularly different culturally.

You know, the Japanese use more violent video games than we do. It can't be that we have more mentally disturbed people than other -- you know? The one thing that seems to vary here is the easy availability of guns.

GLADWELL: Guns, yes. And handguns.

ZAKARIA: And handguns in particular.

GLADWELL: Let's remember if you're talking about mass shootings, they're less than one percent of the problem. Thirteen hundred mass shooting deaths in the last 50 years versus roughly 2 million, you know, ordinary homicides. So it's --

ZAKARIA: Most homicides are with a handgun, somebody you often know, right?

GLADWELL: Someone you often. Yes.

ZAKARIA: Where you've gotten into an argument. And because you have the handgun, the argument can end up in violence.

GLADWELL: Is resolved using violence. And that is -- you know, one of the -- I did two podcast episodes after my book came out on Baltimore, which has had this stunning drop in homicides in the last four years. They were at 350 a year and they're -- they could be under 100 this year. And they've been using -- they use a strategy called focus deterrence, which has been sort of piloted in other cities in this country where you -- where you deal with that -- those kinds of -- you understand that what homicide is, is personal antagonisms.

And you reach out on a personal basis to intervene and interrupt the cycles of revenge and retaliation that drive these things. You're not doing any kind of -- you're not passing any new legislation. You're not removing guns from the street.

You're not changing -- the Supreme Court's not issuing a new ruling. You're not, you know, throwing millions of dollars. You're not turning Baltimore into Paris.

You are understanding that what violence is is an interpersonal dynamic that has become toxic and gone awry and you are trying to correct that toxicity.

[10:55:07]

That's the kind of thing that I think -- that's where we should be putting our energy and focus is treating this as a social dynamic gone bad and understanding that -- and trying to solve the crisis one altercation at a time. That to me is -- I've been so blown away by what has been happening in Baltimore as a kind of model for how we attack this problem.

ZAKARIA: All right. We're going to end on a hopeful note. Malcolm Gladwell, as always with everything you write, the book is fantastic. Thank you.

GLADWELL: Thank you so much, Fareed.

ZAKARIA: Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.

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