The Global gun news has been dominated this week by the events in Charleston, which we have covered and which we don’t want to trivialize. However, many self-important people (you know, the ones who run for President a few years before the actual election) have said some very silly things this week. We thought, since there wasn’t a whole lot of other news floating around, that we’d do a special news segment, covering what some of the presidential hopefuls have said about gun control.
It’s no surprise that Hillary Clinton and President Obama are in lock-step on the issue following a tragedy. The president is a well-known gun control advocate, though most of his measures to this point have failed. The President has called for action on his gun control measures (which, though misguided, are at least concrete measures) while Mrs. Clinton has done the same, asking “How many people do we need to see cut down before we act?” Naturally, Clinton has no real gun policy of her own, backtracking from a federal gun registry she supported back in 2000. What we can say for sure about her policy, if it ever sees the light of day, is that it will take most of our guns away and still not have the ability to prevent truly evil events. Several Democratic candidates of lesser aspirations followed suit, playing the classic game that Democrats like to call “parroting,” where the less important people repeat EXACTLY WHAT THE FRONTRUNNER SAYS OVER AND OVER.
Bernie Sanders, who would be the Democratic dark horse, has often painted himself as the Hillary alternative. Sanders hails from Vermont, a state without gun control, and where “event the liberals have guns.” In response to Charleston, Sanders simply said “I want to talk – at length – [about guns] but not right now. We applaud him for staying above the fray, and we also note that while he has voted for some gun control issues, he did famously vote against the 1993 Brady control measure, as well as other gun control laws.
Jeb Bush has said a few things regarding gun control, notably back in April that Obama should focus on Islamic terrorists who have guns. This, in retrospect, sounds like something his brother might say. He also said that he didn’t know what motivated the killer, and that he didn’t know what was in the killer’s mind. Perhaps a grasp of the obvious is just not something genetically necessary to the Bush children. That said, Bush is one of a few candidates in the Republican field who has an A+ rating from the NRA, and passed the Florida’s 2005 Stand Your Ground law, which is pretty monumental.