War & Peace Quote by Larry Elder

Elder’s line works because it’s a taunt disguised as a metaphor: if you support gun control, you’re siding with the people most likely to harm you. The chicken-and-Colonel-Sanders image is doing heavy lifting here. It collapses a messy policy debate into a slapstick betrayal narrative, turning a political position into a punchline about self-destruction. The joke lands fast because it leans on a familiar brand villain and a simple predator-prey script: the powerless are being duped into cheering their own demise.

The specific intent is to shame women who back gun regulation by framing their stance as not just wrong, but incoherent. It’s persuasion by ridicule. Rather than argue about empirical questions (Does gun availability increase risk at home? Do certain laws reduce violence?), Elder asserts a moral and strategic clarity: the rational woman should want maximal access to armed self-defense, and any deviation is proof of naivete or ideological capture.

Subtextually, it also recruits a broader conservative story about paternalism: “They” (liberal lawmakers, elites, institutions) promise protection, but actually disarm you. The gendered target matters. Women are positioned as uniquely vulnerable and therefore uniquely obligated to embrace firearms; support for restrictions becomes a kind of false consciousness. It’s an argument that treats fear as evidence and empowerment as hardware.

Context: this kind of line thrives in talk radio and opinion journalism, where compression and provocation beat nuance. It’s culture-war rhetoric calibrated for replay value, converting anxiety about crime and distrust of the state into an identity test: are you on the side of self-reliance, or are you cheering the fryer?