Sen. Raphael Warnock (R-GA) conceded on Sunday that no particular gun law that would have stopped the deadly shooting at a Georgia high school last week even as he blamed firearms for the tragedy anyway.
During an interview on NBC, “Meet The Press” moderator Kristen Welker asked Warnock whether there was a “specific law” that he thought could have prevented the shooting that killed four people given how the father of suspected 14-year-old shooter reportedly told investigators he gave the AR-15-style rifle used in the attack to his son as a holiday gift last year. Both the alleged gunman and his father have since been arrested and charged.
“Listen, 14-year-olds don’t need AR-15s, and we need to get these military-style weapons off the streets. Eighty-seven percent of Americans (Democrats and Republicans, according to the Fox News report last year), believe that we ought to have universal background checks and still we can’t even get that done in Congress,” Warnock said.
“Listen, there is no one single law that will stop all of these tragedies. In a sense, I think we have to broaden the scope of the question because after all we have two mass shootings a day in our country, based on the data just last year. And this does not happen everywhere in the world,” he added before chiding politicians who are “beholden to the gun lobby” and lamenting how “we’re all sitting ducks” when it comes to school shootings.
Welker also repeatedly pressed Warnock on whether he thinks Vice President Kamala Harris, who is running for the presidency atop the Democratic Party’s ticket, should support a mandatory gun buy-back program for so-called “assault weapons” like Harris said she would in 2019 during her first White House campaign. The moderator noted how Harris’ campaign told her overnight that Harris will “not push for mandatory buy-backs but has expressed support for an assault weapons ban, expanded background checks, red flag laws.”
In his first response, Warnock said, “We’re not going to be able to get where we need to go without action in Congress.” The senator said he was “heartened” by the enactment two years ago of the “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act,” which The Daily Wire reported as the most expansive gun control law in decades that gave financial grants to states for “red-flag” laws and increased background check stipulations for 18 to 21-year-olds.
“It was the first gun safety law we passed in 30 years. Thirty years. And it was modest, but it did save lives. But clearly (in the wake of what happened just the other day in Winder, Georgia), it’s not enough. And the least we can do is move forward on the bipartisan spaces where ordinary people agree,” Warnock said. “Clearly, there’s a disconnect between what the people, the American people want, and what they’re able to get out of their government. Again, 87% of Americans believe in background checks, and yet I hear politicians say that it’s not guns who kill people, it’s people who kill people. And yet we don’t even want to know who those people are. We won’t even support common sense gun reform.”
Asked again about whether Harris should support a mandatory gun buy-back program, Warnock said, “As a pastor I’ve done buy-back programs. You can pick this issue or that issue. But I think that, again, there’s not one single thing that will make all of this go away.”
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