Morning Joe's panel talked about all the people killed via gun violence this weekend, including a 20-year-old man and 18-year-old woman identified as Aleah Gonzales.
She was amazing. She was the best sister I could ever ask for. And I miss her so bad.
Willie Geist said in addition to Gonzales, 28 people were injured in the shooting, the youngest 13 years old.
"The authorities are asking for the public's help to provide information after sharing social media videos before the shooting started. And police are concerned about preparing for possible retaliation in this case. Katty Kay, you raised it and it seems to that in the summertime and on the Fourth of July, but the truth is, it happens all the time in this country, and you have to sit here the day after the Fourth of July and read a litany of mass shootings of gun violence in the country, and some with handguns, and we don't know the motive in all of them, and there was an AR-15 style weapon with body armor and loaded down with ammunition. Only stopped because the police intervened," he said.
"Yeah, listen to that little boy that lost his big sister," Kay said.
"Still, every single time it makes you tear up when you hear these stories because it's unnecessary. it's a choice that America is making. It's america's exceptional problem, right? It doesn't happen anywhere else in the world to the same degree. We have regulated other things. America has regulated seat belts in cars, which means the number of children being killed in car accidents is way down, and the American public is on the side of doing the gun control, but the government is failing the American people and they are not representing what democracy wants."
Oh, for God's sake. It's not "the government" that stops progress on gun violence, and she knows it. It's Republicans! The overwhelming majority of Americans want sensible gun regulations. It's the NRA-bought-and-sold Republicans who block gun regulation at every single turn. And they use conservative state legislatures to stop cities from regulating guns.
Oh, and let's not forget the conservative-controlled vending machine of a Supreme Court that rewrote the very definitions that we apply to guns:
In 2008, the Court in a 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller held that a D.C. law that restricted unlicensed functional handguns within homes violated the Second Amendment. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the Heller majority opinion. “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home,” Scalia said.
See how that works? Extremist judges always want to stick strictly to the original text -- until it gets in the way of their corporate sponsors. That "well-regulated militia" thing? A mere formality!
Two years later, Justice Alito wrote for the same majority bloc in McDonald v. Chicago, where the Court answered a question it didn’t tackle in 2008: Does the Second Amendment protect against state infringement of the right to possess a handgun for self-defense?
The Court held that it did, and thereby “incorporated” the Second Amendment as also applying to the states through the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause. “It is clear that the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty,” Alito said. “A provision of the Bill of Rights that protects a right that is fundamental from an American perspective applies equally to the Federal Government and the States.”
In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens questioned the majority’s logic. “The fact that the right to keep and bear arms appears in the Constitution should not obscure the novelty of the Court’s decision to enforce that right against the States. By its terms, the Second Amendment does not apply to the States; read properly, it does not even apply to individuals outside of the militia context,” Stevens said.
And it wasn't Democrats who fought to give protection from legal immunity to gun manufacturers.
Give it up, Katty. Speak the truth. Tell viewers it's Republicans, not "the government."
