This is progress: It's been a week since the latest high-profile mass shooting, and the media is still talking about gun control!
"Democratic front-runner Joe Biden is out with a new op-ed calling for the assault weapons ban to be reinstated and arguing it worked. And Joe pointed out there was polling that showed that 70% of Americans support the ban on military style weapons which was enacted in 1994, but allowed to expire ten years later," Joe Scarborough said.
"The vice president wrote in the New York Times, 'When you have that kind of broad public support for legislation that will make everyone safer and it still can't get through the Senate, the problem is with weak-willed leaders who care more about their campaign coffers than children in coffins.' He continued, 'There's so much we can do. Practical, sensible steps that draw broad support among the American people. but we will see only more and deadlier shootings if we can continue to dodge the core issue of unregulated assault weapons and high capacity magazines in our communities.'
"Mike, it's a powerful, powerful op-ed. but it happens to be backed up by overwhelming polling. We have seen since Newtown a complete transformation in the polling and the politicians have been slow. The republican politicians especially have been slow catching up to the public. But the public's moving so far ahead of them right now. I don't know that they're going to have any choice but to start passing sensible gun safety legislation to stop the next killing in a church or a synagogue or a Walmart, a school or a country music festival," Scarborough said.
"Well, Joe, you're right. You're right. But I mean, how long have we been talking about these items? How long? I mean, Joe Biden's op-ed page piece in the Times is correct," Mike Barnicle said.
"The establishment of the assault weapons ban, you can prove it has an effect, and he suggested amendments to the law that could be enforced now, implemented now. Smart gun technology. Things like that. But again, I revert back to the question I just posed: How long have we been talking about these things? We have had children killed, babies killed in classrooms in Connecticut. We have had church shootings, multiple church shootings, synagogue shootings, El Paso, Dayton. We talk and we talk and we talk, and the United States Senate sits there looking at overwhelming evidence in the polls you just referenced. People favor the establishment of new, tougher laws and nothing ever gets done."
