Things aren’t right. If a burglar breaks into your home and you shoot him, he can sue you. For what, restraint of trade?

Maher uses a deliberately absurd legal punchline—“restraint of trade”—to satirize what he portrays as a culture of excessive litigation and distorted notions of rights. The setup contrasts an intuitive moral expectation (a homeowner defending against a burglar) with a counterintuitive legal outcome (the criminal suing the victim), implying that legal systems can sometimes seem to reward wrongdoing or punish self-defense. The joke also plays on the language of commerce and antitrust law, treating burglary as if it were a legitimate business, thereby highlighting the perceived mismatch between common sense and legal technicalities. As with much of Maher’s comedy, the line is less a factual claim than a rhetorical critique of modern legal and social norms.