Pundits on MSNBC, including a member of the Biden administration, responded to Wednesday’s San Jose mass shooting by demanding that Congress pass harsh new gun control laws — even though the killing took place inside a gun-free zone.
At 6:34 a.m. Pacific time, a gunman killed eight people during a union meeting inside the Valley Transportation Authority’s light rail station in San Jose, California. The gunman has been identified in multiple reports as Samuel J. Cassidy, a 57-year-old VTA employee. He was also killed.
Left-leaning politicians and media outlets immediately seized on the tragedy to renew their calls for stricter gun control, although the transit facility is a gun-free zone.
The Valley Transit Authority website states:
It is unlawful for any person to possess any of the following items on a bus, train or transit facility:
- Any firearm
- Any imitation firearm as defined in California Penal Code (CPC) Section 417.4
- Any instrument that expels a metallic projectile, such as a BB or pellet, through the force of air pressure, CO2 pressure, or spring action, or any spot marker gun or paint gun
- Any metal military practice, metal or plastic replica hand grenade
- Any unauthorized tear gas weapon
- Any undetectable knife, as described in CPC Section 17290.
Violators will be prosecuted to the maximum penalty allowed by law pursuant to CPC 171.7(b).
Some 98% of all mass shootings have taken place in gun-free zones since 1950, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center, although gun control activists dispute the number.
Nonetheless, the Biden administration, state and local Democratic officials, and media talking heads seemed to indicate that stronger gun laws could have prevented the shooting.
Their calls came despite the fact that they did not yet know the kind of firearm the assailant used while committing the crime. Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith announced Thursday that the gunman appeared to have purchased the two 9mm semi-automatic handguns used in the assault legally, although the 11 magazines he used held 12 rounds rather than the 10 allowed under a California law currently pending court review.
Cedric Richmond, a special adviser to Joe Biden and the director of the White House’s Office of Public Engagement, went on MSNBC’s “Katy Tur Reports,” telling guest anchor Geoff Bennett that Senate Republicans’ refusal to pass Democratic gun control bills is “a real failure to meet the needs of the American people.”
“There are bills right now sitting in the Senate that the Senate could take up and pass to protect people, protect families,” said Richmond, a former five-term congressman from Louisiana.
He added that eight families had lost a loved one in this shooting — implying these bills may have prevented their tragedy.
Richmond said the San Jose shooting should jolt the nation into passing a host of new restrictions on the Second Amendment.
“As a country, we should be outraged. We should not only offer our prayers, and our condolences, and our thoughts, but we ought to offer some action. And we ought to do things to prevent this,” Richmond said, again implying the bills would have prevented Wednesday’s shooting.
President Joe Biden is “talking about everything from making sure that we have red flag laws, reduce the size of cartridges, ban assault weapons, universal background checks, close the Charleston loophole, doing all of those things that can protect American lives,” Richmond told Bennett. “It’s time. We really call upon Congress to get this done.”
Richmond noted that, as a U.S. senator, Biden “passed the assault weapons ban, and it’s time for us to get another assault weapons ban in place. That ban also limited the size of the ammunition cartridges.” Since the law has lapsed, the AR-15 has become the most popular rifle in the United States.
Others who responded to the deadly shooting by blaming “gun culture,” or clamoring for more legislation, include U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin, and California Assemblymember Evan Low.
Earlier in the “Katy Tur Show,” Bennett interviewed Jim Cavanaugh, a former special agent for the ATF, who called for a “better mosaic of firearms laws” at the federal level.
“There’s bills up there for background checks and ammunition capacity on assault weapons. There’s some good bills up there that could help America. They need to work on those,” said Cavanaugh, who defended the ATF’s actions during the deadly 1993 showdown with the Branch Davidians at Waco.
“State governments, likewise, should be working to make reasonable gun laws that don’t hurt the citizens’ constitutional rights but make us all safer,” he continued. “We don’t have that. In effect, what we’ve passed is guns where everybody can open carry a rifle, walking all around, going into statehouses with rifles, walking all around. That’s not making us safer. That’s just letting people parade around with long guns for their own aggrandizement. It doesn’t mean anything about a constitutional right, and it’s certainly not making us any safer.”
MSNBC failed to report that California already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. The Giffords Law Center, a gun control activist group, gives California an “A” for its passage of gun-restricting legislation.