Politico
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey questioned the need for more gun control Thursday, saying that if the Colorado shooter wasn’t able to acquire his guns legally, “he might just as well have taken a car and driven it into a school bus.”
“Apparently, you have some guy who is a bit nutty here,” Armey said on CNN’s “Starting Point,” referring to James Holmes, who has been charged with killing 12 people and injuring more than 50 in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater last week. “And he wanted to wreak havoc on a large number of people for whatever reasons he had. We don’t understand that yet. Maybe a psychiatrist will understand it. If, in fact, he had not been capable of acquiring a gun, he might just as well have taken a car and driven it into a school bus.
“The fact of the matter is that we have got a culture right now that seems to say: ‘Let’s control the guns and have all kinds of laxities and forgiveness and understanding and so forth for the people who hold the guns,’” Armey, now the head of the tea party group FreedomWorks, told host Soledad O’Brien. “My own view is, let’s get tough on criminals, have tough penalties for the illegal use of weaponry or any other illegal activity that’s an assailment against another person. Get tough on those folks. Crack down on them.”
The onetime Texas congressman said the focus shouldn’t be on the “object,” but on the “aberrance of the individual.”
“Why not focus on both?” O’Brien asked.
“More people are killed in automobiles every year than with guns,” Armey responded. “I don’t hear anybody talking about banning automobiles.”
“But they make you wear a seatbelt,” O’Brien interjected.
Armey went on to draw a parallel between gun-control laws and NCAA sanctions.
“We are guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States a right to bear arms,” he said. “There are many good reasons why true and honest and law-abiding people cherish that right. To trespass that right against those innocent people because of the abhorrent behavior of others is not acceptable. It’s like taking away scholarships of future football players for the bad offenses of a past football player.”
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