The entire nation is wrapped up in the debate over the Second Amendment as it is after each mass shooting. But this time, it’s different. It seems we’ve hit many people’s last straw and they are bolder than ever to flat-out call for an outright gun ban across the board, including members of the mainstream media.
CNN analyst Kirsten Powers, who was particularly testy, spoke with The Lead host Jake Tapper and said guns should be “banned everywhere.” Conservative guest Mary Katharine Ham wanted clarification if she meant just assault-style rifles like the AR-15.
“I actually have friends who believe that they’re toys and so, they want to go and use them at a shooting range,” Powers said. “Then, you could have something that keeps them locked up at the shooting range and go use them there. But I don’t think you need to have [an AR-15] to protect your house.”
Powers said growing up in Alaska, her family had 12 firearms in their home. “I’m not anti-gun,” she insisted. “We were more than able to protect our house with a shotgun. I don’t understand why you need this kind of gun when you weigh it against the damage [it inflicts].”
Ham reminded Powers that handguns are used in far more crimes than AR-15s and that’s when the deep truth was exposed.
“So, is the next step them?” Ham asked.
“Actually they are banned in a lot of places,” Powers responded.
“And do we have less gun crime in those places?” Ham pressed.
“We don’t have less gun crime,” Powers admitted. “Like in Chicago, people go to states that don’t have them banned, they buy them, and they run them into Chicago and they sell them. So, actually, if they were banned everywhere, we might have a different outcome.”
And there it is. (Video here.)
Next is New York Times op-ed columnist Bret Stephens. He appeared on MSNBC spouting his oft-promoted idea of repealing the Second Amendment:
“I’ve been saying in the pages of ‘The Times,’ we should repeal the Second Amendment. And I say this for a variety of reasons, but one of them is often piecemeal gun control efforts don’t work because if you can buy one kind of gun in Indiana, you can bring it into Illinois. But the other thing is, it’s going to be very difficult to get at the root of the problem — which is about 300 million guns swimming around in the United States — unless you say, ‘No, in fact, you do not have an automatic constitutional right to buy these kinds of weapons, often in unlimited quantities.'”
Stephens knew that most MSNBC viewers would find ridding the country of hundreds of millions of guns nothing more than a “pipe dream,” but he offered them a glimmer of hope through an analogy on the cultural shift on same-sex marriage:
“Twenty-five years ago, if you had said, ‘Marriage equality,’ that would’ve been a pipe dream. You set out the goal, and then you work toward it.”
And there it is… again. (Video here.)
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