Connecticut’s Sen. Chris Murphy didn’t hold back on Monday’s Morning Joe in describing what he thinks of those opposed to gun control reform measures.
“What you have here today is a bunch of gun control social Darwinists who really think that natural selection is going to take care of this problem,” said the Democratic senator. “They [think] if you put guns in the hands of good guys and bad guys and you hope that the good guys shoot the bad guys. They say the only way you can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Murphy also noted that legislator opposition to background checks stems from this belief—not just fear of the gun lobby.
“A lot of these folks who are going to vote against [background checks] on the Senate floor, really believe the best way to solve this is to throw a whole mess of guns out there and let people shoot it out,” he added.
Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, argued on the Sunday talk shows that background checks won’t stop criminals from getting guns. Murphy called Rubio’s argument “ridiculous,” and added that choosing to not pass a law because it might be disobeyed is “essentially an argument for anarchy.”
“If we are spending all of our time talking about background checks as if somehow criminals will never get guns because they’ll have to go through background checks, we’re lying to people,” Rubio said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Guns are what people are using but violence is their problem. No one is having a debate about the violence problem.”
A recent report found that states with the strongest gun laws had the fewest gun deaths. States with the most laws had a 42% lower gun death rate than states with the least number of laws. msnbc’s Joe Scarborough commented that the Florida Republican senator just doesn’t get it. “The idea is to make sure fewer criminals get guns,” the Morning Joe host said. “The idea is to make sure members of al-Qaida don’t go on the Internet and say to jihadists across the world, ‘Come to America because we don’t’ have criminal background checks that are sufficient.’” More than 1.5 million people have been denied a gun after a background checks, Murphy added.
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