Glenn Beck has a new book out.

A neutral way to describe its subject would be to say it's about the debate over gun laws. The cover puts it slightly differently: "CONTROL: Exposing the Truth About Guns." I'm pretty sure buyers of this book already believe themselves to know the "truth about guns"; what they're looking to Beck for is, well, ammo for the debate.

"Control" has some of that, some information that could be categorized as positive arguments for the widespread availability of firearms. There's a nice section on how multiple-shot, magazine-fed guns "date back at least to the 1600s" – a nugget of research Beck uses to argue that the Founders fully intended for the second amendment to cover high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic weapons. For the record, I am in favor of the right to bear antique pepperbox revolvers; Mark Twain wrote that his "carried a ball like a homeopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult."

But for a book about killing machines, Control is oddly, determinedly defensive. The whole first section is devoted to addressing public figures' statements about guns and gun laws. In his introduction, Beck boasts that "my staff and I watched countless hours of cable news and read hundreds of newspaper columns and articles" in order to find "the quotes about guns and the second amendment that seemed to come up most often, the stuff that is so pervasive that it's barely even questioned anymore."

But from what actually appears on the page, they mainly seemed to watch CNN on weeknights, 9-10pm ET. To judge by the attention Beck lavishes on Piers Morgan – he's quoted 74 times – you'd think the magnitude of his influence on American culture ranges somewhere between God and Oprah. Stephen King – whose "Guns" essay is the second-most cited (26 times) source of "pervasive" anti-gun thinking – is at least a name people might recognize, and not confuse with an off-brand hotel chain.

Really, all that research seems to have done is provide padding for the "notes" section of the book, which appears at first glance to be authoritatively – or at least, exhaustively – sourced. But the citations are mostly for the anti-gun quotes ("Nicholas Kristof, interview by Piers Morgan, Piers Morgan Tonight, CNN, 8 January 2013"). When it comes to documenting the research that supposedly debunks anti-gun claims, Beck pulls the underclassman's trick of completely citing a source each time it's used. Beck puffs up the scant amount of research that says what he wants it to say (guns make us safer!) and never, as far as I could tell, sends readers to the papers whose findings show, again and again, that the presence of guns in a home puts lives at risk, and that lax gun laws correlate with higher body counts on a state by state basis. (And here are some of those studies.)

The body of Control is deceptively short; I thought I would breeze through it. The problem is that it's so riddled with incomplete, out-of-date, and selective data that I kept stopping every few pages, or paragraphs, to check Beck's facts. As some point, I should have probably just assumed that every factoid was somehow cherry-picked and stopped looking up the more substantive studies, but Beck's audacity begs to be challenged. His padded footnotes make him overbold – as when he concludes in a section on background checks, "there is not a single, credible academic study showing that these regulations reduce any type of violent crime."

It took me five minutes to find this depressing statistic from a study of convicted criminals in the journal Injury Prevention:

"Nearly three of ten gun offenders (73 of 253 or 28.9%) were legal gun possessors but would have been prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms when committing their most recent offense if their states had stricter prohibitions."

And sometimes, you don't even have to turn to Google to see that Beck's numbers just distract from overall realities. In dismissing the notion that America's high rates of gun ownership have any correlation to firearm homicides, Beck points out:

"In 2011, the US murder rate was 4.7 per 100,000 people and the gun murder rate was 3.2. Much of eastern Europe, most of Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, all but one South American nation, and all of Central America and Mexico suffer from higher murder rates than we do."

Maybe my fellow citizens feel differently, but "America: not as many murders as Southeast Asia" just doesn't offer the kind of snappy slogan that makes me swell with national pride.

So look, I could spend a lot of time on this aspect of the book alone. Indeed, there is a veritable cottage industry in debunking the research of one of Beck's oft-cited (13 times) sources, law professor John Lott. Lott has been accused of fabricating research and admitted that he presented himself as a former student ("Mary Rosh") in online discussion boards to defend his work and generally praise him (Lott was "the best professor I ever had").

Beck's transgressions, in this particular case, however, are less colorful. Busting his unsteady command of evidence loses some of its thrill when, time and again, a couple of minutes of research shows that Beck is ignoring, distorting, or just incompetently representing the data he doesn't like. (My favorite example of the latter? Beck citing research that showed a decrease in firearm homicides in Australia didn't count, because "the overall numbers are so small that the change is statistically irrelevant.")

But let's cut to the chase: Beck is a moral monster and possibly insane.

Here, I refer you to his defense of the argument that gun rights advocates' arguments ultimately depend on the possibility of the US undergoing "Extreme Makeover: Dictator Edition." That's his joke: give him some credit … for at least the beat or two it takes to get to his earnest assessment of that program going live. He has thought this through: sure, he says, it would be difficult for armed citizens to completely hold off a tyrannical government. On the other hand:

"If things were ever to get to the point where armed conflict became necessary – especially if the underlying issue was an abandonment of the constitution by our leaders – we'd likely see most soldiers refuse to fight or even flip sides and join the masses."

I think Beck misunderstands the nature of tyranny. It's one of the few places where I can reasonably claim to be less optimistic about human nature than he is. Beck's imagination about apocalyptic scenarios runs to a state-of-nature framework:

"What happens when food supply lines get cut off, or an epic storm cuts a large swath of people off from the outside world? Would you rather be hunkered down with a handgun holding a maximum of seven rounds (which is now the limit in New York), or an AR-15 with a magazine large enough to ensure that your entire family is protected?"

I've seen people respond to "epic storm" situations and they do amazingly well. People give shelter to each other; they hand out blankets; they give blood and donate money. This is not to say that there isn't opportunistic crime; it's just that post-Sandy, most victims would have preferred a case of water to any kind of gun. (And that is why we hand out water and not guns.)

Political upheaval looks a lot different than the aftermath of a natural disaster, or even a single attack, or one individual's personal struggle. A sustained march toward oppression hardly ever has a moment when "soldiers refuse to fight." It's more subtle, a slippery slope that is far uglier and more global than the "first they limit the magazines, then they arrest the gun owners" fantasy Beck and his compatriots engage in.

Beck narrows in with obvious zeal on that small argument in his discussion of gun rights in Nazi Germany. Truly, Beck thinks he has found his nuclear-option example with the idea "You know who else hated guns? Hitler." To be fair, he documents the Nazi crackdown on firearms ownership pretty well. Or at least, he doesn't use statistics and so I'm less immediately suspicious. But this is how he rounds out the section:

"If there had been no gun control laws in Germany prior to Hitler, and the German people were as heavily armed as Americans are today, would things still have played out the same way? Obviously, no one knows for sure – but it's hard to make a convincing case that things could've been much worse."

Oh, OK, there's a caveat there, "obviously, no one knows for sure …" Wait, what? An armed citizenry might not have stopped the Holocaust, but it also wouldn't have "made it much worse"?

It's the "much" in "much worse" that gives me chills. He's leaving the door open for the idea that an armed citizenry might have made the Holocaust a little worse. To imagine a scale of tragedy on which the Holocaust isn't, you know, ten bespeaks a mind that is either locked tight against reality or just has a hideously misshapen sense of morality.

But, really, thank you for brining this up, Glenn. The rise of the Nazi regime does highlight a disturbing fact about tyrannical governments: the most successful ones don't subdue a country with violence alone, anyway. Most ordinary Germans didn't have guns, but Hitler didn't use violence against most ordinary Germans, either. The Nazi party, in fact, championed "ordinary Germans"; Hitler's genius lay in convincing those Germans in a particular definition of "German" – and ordinary, for that matter. The horror of the Holocaust is that guns are puny weapons against state-sanctioned genocide and pervasive racism against a minority population.

In a parallel bit of rhetorical theater, Beck dedicates Control to Martin Luther King.

"King owned several guns but was subjected to the worst kind of gun control – and deprived of his basic right to defend himself and his family – when police in Alabama denied him a concealed carry permit in 1956."

I would argue the "worst kind of gun control" is the kind that allowed James Earl Ray to get one. But never mind … the point is that tyranny succeeds not because the government turns on its citizens, but by turning citizens against each other. Arming them will just, to borrow a phrase, make things "much worse".