Former congressman Trey Gowdy was generally pretty good on Second Amendment issues when he was on Capitol Hill, though he did suggest that he was okay with banning bump stocks, and perhaps even placing limitations on magazine capacity in the wake of the Parkland shooting in 2018.
More recently, Gowdy has said that he doesn’t care if someone like fellow Fox host Dana Perino owns an AR-15, but “There are other people that I don’t want them to have a plastic fork or knife, because they’re mentally ill. We’ve got to deal with the mental illness part.”
As Mediaite reports, during a discussion about the shooting in Minneapolis today, Gowdy didn’t bring up mental illness specifically. Instead, he argued that “we’re gonna have to have a conversation of freedom versus protecting children”, raising “access to guns” as an issue.
TREY GOWDY: Uh… That uh… There our system is reactive. Something bad happens, we react to it.
And what people are crying for now is how can we prevent this? How can we stop it?
And the only way to stop it is to identify the shooter ahead of time or keep the weapons out of their hands.
And so we’re gonna have to have a conversation of freedom versus protecting children. I mean how many school shootings does it take before we’re going to have a conversation about keeping firearms out–?
It’s always a young White male, almost always. I mean, did anyone this morning think “I wonder if that was a female.”
Did any of y’all think that? I mean there’s been one school shooting involving a female. One, yeah Tennessee. But other than that it is usually young White males.
LISA BOOTHE: But do we not already have laws on the books? For these types of situations?
TREY GOWDY: Like what?
LISA BOOTHE: Well, murder! Is what happened. And maybe the why is that you had a 10-year-old and an 8-year old praying in the pews. Were they targeted for their faith?
I’m not sure what Gowdy’s point is. According to police the killer in Minneapolis was 23 years old and had no criminal record that would have prohibited him from legally purchasing a firearm. Is Gowdy suggesting that all young white men be barred from owning guns? What kind of limitations on our freedoms does he believe would have protected the children who were shot in the church pews during mass?
Gowdy himself didn’t say, which is another shame. It seems to me that if you’re going to suggest gun control can prevent these types of horrific incidents, you should at least be able to cite a specific policy.
I don’t disagree that we have a mental health crisis in this country, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who sees a therapist or is on anti-depressants should be prohibited from owning a firearm. There needs to be a clear showing of dangerousness before we start depriving people of their Second Amendment rights, and at this point it doesn’t appear that the killer was ever even placed in a mental health hold, despite emerging evidence that he was deeply disturbed for some time.
My question for Gowdy is, knowing only what law enforcement knew before the first shots were fired, what basis was there to limit this individuals access to firearms? No criminal record, no adjudication of mental illness. If, under those conditions, Gowdy still believes that adults can be denied access to their Second Amendment rights, does he believe we have a right to keep and bear arms at all?
Editor’s Note: Gun control activists depend on emotional reactions like Gowdy’s to advance their agenda.
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