A former Republican governor of North Carolina said that “institutional breakdown” was to blame for gun violence in America.
Speaking on “Meet the Press” Sunday, Pat McCrory said that lawmakers need to be “strategic” about pressing for gun reform, claiming radical gun control campaigns would only push people “back into the corner.” Instead, McCrory stressed the need to fix the breakdowns in law enforcement, families, and society that he says lead to mass shootings and gun violence.
“I think we need to be very strategic in how we say this,” McCrory said of gun reform. “One thing we can’t have is [Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke] saying ‘we need to get rid of all guns’ or ‘we need to confiscate guns,’ because that’s gonna make people back into the corner even more and go, ‘wait a minute, they’re trying to take away our guns.’ Because there’s a reason for guns right now, that people are buying them. In fact, gun sales are up right now, after this tragedy.”
Host Chuck Todd cut in, accusing gun manufacturers of marketing to the tragedy.
McCrory seemed to reject the premise.
“There’s a feeling out there of an institutional breakdown, not just at the federal government level, but at the local and state also, because we’re all involved,” he said.
McCory noted that when he was mayor of Charlotte, he took every shooting “personally.”
“You’d go find out that the 17 or 18-year-old kid who was involved in the murder or who killed, you’d go back and find that that incident could have been prevented long ago. There was a breakdown in the family, there was alcohol and drugs in the household, there was domestic violence, there was a dropout in school, there was violence in the school–”
“But every country in the world has these issues,” Todd cut in again. “But they don’t have the easy access to the weapon.”
“I don’t know if every country in the world has what we’re seeing of an institutional breakdown in all of our organizations. It’s like spaghetti right now. No one’s talking to each other at the local, state, and federal level. We even saw this at the [Uvalde] shooting, where we had all these different police agencies come, and they’re not communicating with each other, even with the 911 call, that’s at the micro-level. At the macro-level, is just a disjointed policy and disjointed operation of that policy…we’ve got angry young men who are doing most of these killings, whether it be in Chicago or whether it be mass killings. It’s angry young men, and we have got to target our resources toward these angry young men…and somehow prevent them from getting these weapons of mass destruction.”