Reality Check: Too Soon To Talk Politics?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- In the aftermath of Las Vegas, some politicians say it's not the time to talk politics or gun laws.
"I think it's premature," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said.
"I don't think we should politicize it," Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) said.
"We'll be talking about gun laws as time goes by," President Trump said.
But the reality is politicians from both parties talk about gun laws after massacres all the time -- and President Trump is often among the first, and loudest.
On the same day of the Orlando nightclub shooting, then-candidate Trump accepted congratulations for "being right on Islamic terrorism."
Here's a tweet on November 15, 2015, on the day after gunmen shot up a Paris concert hall, criticizing President Obama:
And just two days after the San Bernardino shooting, Trump imagined if the terror victims had carried guns.
"If you had a couple of people in there with guns?," candidate Trump told a crowd at a North Carolina campaign rally on December 4, 2015, "And that knew how to use them? And were in that room? You wouldn't have dead people! The dead people would be the other guys!"
In President Trump's White House, it is too soon to talk policy, according to Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
"There's a time and place for political debate," she said.
But Sanders also asserted that strict gun laws don't work.
"I think if you look to Chicago," she said, "where you have 4,000 victims of gun related crimes, they have the strictest gun laws in the country."
Not only do all politicians talk about gun violence after mass shootings, many states actually pass laws. In the last 25 years, more than 3,000 gun laws have been passed after massacres, according to a Harvard study published in March 2017. Researchers found states controlled by Republicans loosened gun laws, and states controlled by Democrats made gun laws tighter.
That's Reality Check.
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Other Sources:
USA Today
NPR
BBC
New York Times
NPR
