Appearing on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” on Thursday, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) took on leftists for pushing gun control legislation and shaming Americans for offering prayers in the wake of the fatal South Florida school shooting that left 17 people dead.
“It’s disgraceful,” the congressman said of Democrats’ calls for gun control, attempting to take “away the rights of law-abiding citizens” in the wake of tragedy.
Rep. Scalise has a unique perspective on shootings and gun control in general. Scalise was one of the GOP lawmakers targeted for assassination by a crazed left-wing radical during a congressional baseball practice on June 14. He was shot in the hip and almost lost his life. Thankfully, two armed Capitol Police officers were on site and stopped the shooter, who was picking off Republicans one at a time. Everyone on that field would have been killed had it not been for the armed guards, Scalise reiterated to host Laura Ingraham.
Ingraham asked Scalise his thoughts on his Democratic colleagues quickly moving to demand a crackdown on Second Amendment rights in the wake of the Florida school shooting.
“It’s disgraceful,” he said. “Anytime there’s any kind of tragedy — I mean a shooting, a bombing, whatever — immediately you’ve got a group of legislators that go run out, start calling for gun control and taking away the rights of law-abiding citizens.”
Scalise noted that such proposed bills “have nothing to do with these kinds of shootings.”
The representative continued, explaining the obvious: criminals break laws.
“Whatever criminal did these actions violated a whole host of other laws, too,” he said. “So if you think there’s some magic ‘unicorn law’ that’s gonna stop it from happening, just keep in mind that he violated probably dozens of laws already, including murdering people. That’s against the law. So this idea that one magic law is going to stop the next one from happening — it’s not.”
Scalise added that mental illness and “gun-free zones” seem to be commonalities in such shootings.
“What you do see in common is, number one, you see a lot of mental illness in common, but you also see gun-free zones. Shooters know that if you go to a gun-free zone, you’re the only one with a gun that nobody else has,” he said.
In the attack on GOP lawmakers this summer, Scalise noted that it was armed police officers that stopped bloodshed, not a “gun-free zone.”
“And ultimately that’s what took him down. It was other people with guns that took down the shooter,” he explained. “And if there weren’t other people with guns to stop the shooter, there would have been 15 members of Congress executed that day. And there weren’t, luckily, by the grace of God, first of all. There were true miracles that happened on that field.”
He also smacked the notion that prayers are meaningless, a quick theme on the Left following any shooting.
“The prayers helped me tremendously. And unfortunately, there’s some on the Left that actually mock praying for people. They say, ‘Oh, do gun control,'” said Scalise. “I needed those prayers. Those prayers helped me and my family at a really difficult time. And you could feel them.”
“These families need prayer. They need counseling. They need help. But let’s go find out the root of these problems,” he added. “And we’re already seeing there were so many things that slipped through the cracks.”
“Every day in America there are people that use guns to stop crimes, to defend their own families. That’s what our Founding Fathers wrote about, by the way. They believed in an innate right of people to have guns for self-defense,” continued Scalise. “And these people that want to take away your rights guised under all these tragedies — go pray for the families. Care about these families. Don’t try to promote your agenda in the middle of a tragedy.”
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