Asked about gun control rhetoric from President Biden and celebrities like actor Matthew McConaughey, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) declared, “Obviously I’m not giving up my AR-15. That’s mine, not happening.”
Crenshaw appeared with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, who started by asking him about President Biden’s appearance on late night TV with Jimmy Kimmel, where he mocked the GOP vis-à-vis gun control. Kilmeade asked, “Did he help the debate with his speech after the shooting?”
“No. No,” Crenshaw answered. “I think they’re doing the same thing they always do after a mass shooting; they politicize it and they try to convince America that you can actually legislate away these extremely rare and anomalous events.”
“These are very evil events,” Crenshaw acknowledged. “I think they make us all cringe; I think they make us all very upset, and that’s understandable.”
“But then we have to take a step back and take the emotion and think what policies do we enact to prevent these things,” he asserted. “Are these preventable? Can you see these mass shooters ahead of time? What kind of contagion is infecting our young people and our old people that they seek to engage in these dramatic mass killings? Ever since Columbine happened these are really difficult questions, and you can’t politicize it or put emotion in front of reason.”
“Obviously I’m not giving up my AR-15,” Crenshaw said firmly. “That’s mine, not happening. I’m pretty clear on that. Look, raising the age to 21, if you are going to talk about that you just need to change what it is to be an adult in America. We need to see that conversation about all aspects of how young people act and mature. So I don’t think an arbitrary 21 versus 18 is really gonna change a whole lot of things when it comes to gun violence.”
He referred to the Senate considering the expansion of background checks for younger people: “That makes a lot of sense. If you’re 18 and you have a terrible juvenile history but we can’t look at it in a background check? We should be able to look at that; that should be part of the analysis on your background check.”
“When it comes to red flag laws, despite what all the trolls on the internet say, I’m really not for red flag laws,” he continued. “There’s good arguments and bad arguments about this, and there’s a lot of misconceptions on both sides of this argument but fundamentally with a red flag law you’re trying to enforce a law before it’s been broken, and that’s a really difficult thing to do. If you take somebody’s word for it and then you confiscate someone’s property and their right to self-defense as a result, this is a really difficult thing to enforce by any practical measure, and I don’t think it will have the outcome either that a lot of Democrats hope that it will.”