Bill O'Reilly tells Stephen Colbert all U.S. gun crimes should be federal crimes

Stephen Colbert scheduled Bill O'Reilly as a guest more than a month ago, but since he was on Monday's Late Show, the two TV hosts started with the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida. Colbert asked O'Reilly how he would respond if he were president, and a very loose and expansive O'Reilly said Orlando wasn't a "tragedy," but a battle in a larger war against Islamic jihadis. They don't represent all of Islam, he said, "but there's enough of them to cause the world pain on a consistent basis. So that's the problem." Colbert noted there's a different way to frame the problem, and the conversation shifted to guns and gun regulation.

O'Reilly wasn't buying Colbert's frame. "It's my job as a news analyst to find a solution to the problem, and the solution is not some kind of federal gun control at a level of taking guns away," he said, earning angry murmurs from the audience and a request for silence from Colbert. O'Reilly pointed to gun violence in Chicago, then provided his own counterexample, Australia, finally arguing that gun violence has also dropped sharply in the U.S. since the mid-1990s, because the U.S. locked up "violent offenders, including drug gangsters."

"My solution to the gun problem is this," O'Reilly said. "No. 1: Congress debates which guns are allowed ... It's perfectly legitimate for Congress then to say, 'What kind of rifles should people be able to buy?'" Colbert clarified that a President O'Reilly would be fine with banning assault weapons (he would), then tried to get back to ISIS. "One more point on the guns, because your crew out here is applauding stuff they shouldn't be applauding," O'Reilly said. "What we need to do here is, every crime — every single crime committed with a gun in this country, whether it's Orlando terrorism or whether it's Chicago and the inner-city drug gangs — every crime is then a federal crime," with tough mandatory minimum sentences.

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In the second half of the interview, O'Reilly explained why he thinks President Obama and Congress should "declare war on the Islamic jihad." Colbert, preternaturally polite through the entire interview, asked when the war against jihad would be over. "The war is over when the level of terrorism goes down, the refugees can return home [to Syria], and you have a basic handle on the situation," O'Reilly said. It's quite a performance. Watch below. Peter Weber