On Saturday evening, CNN’s newest weekend anchor, Pamela Brown, started cutting her teeth as a gun control activist for the liberal news network as she devoted a segment to pushing for more gun control.
After citing a Time magazine report that mass shootings and gun-related deaths surged in 2020, Brown launch into a short commentary in which she fretted that President Joe Biden is moving too slowly to push more gun restrictions:
So while the debate over assault weapons and the discussion of preventing mass shootings are crucial parts of stopping this plague, they are still just the tip of the iceberg. Immediately after the Boulder shooting, President Biden promised quick action — not the first President to do so. For the record, he has yet to introduce legislation or to sign an executive order on guns even though, right now, you could still go to his campaign website and see that dozens of gun control initiatives he promises to enact as President.
She then added:
Meanwhile, in Congress, the House passed a pair of background check bills, but, as always seems to be the case on this issue, they are now languishing in the Senate. Just this year, the U.S. has already suffered more than 10,000 gun violence deaths. How many more thousands of Americans will die before more is done to break the cycle?
After introducing her guest, Nicole Hockley of the Sandy Hook Promise gun control group, Brown began by inviting her to weigh in on whether President Biden is moving quickly enough:
So, as I mentioned, President Biden has yet to send a gun control bill to Congress. He has signed dozens of executive orders, but zero dealing with guns so far, and, a couple of months into his administration, he says that his presidency is about timing. Do you think the time is now for for him to act on guns?
In one of her follow-up questions, the CNN host hinted that she was concerned that interest in the gun control issue might subside before any more restrictions are passed:
And you see after each mass shooting there is a lot of coverage — everyone’s talking about it, both sides talk about it — and then it sort of dies down until the next mass shooting. Which is one of the reasons we wanted to have you on and to do this segment because it’s still something that inflicts — that is a plague in this country.
She soon suggested that people are opposed to more gun laws because they do not believe gun violence will harm them: “And we are sitting here right now having this conversation, and after we have it, more people will die from gun violence. How do you get that message through to more people that, ‘Hey, this could impact you. This could impact your family member’?”
There was no acknowledgement that opponents of more gun control generally believe that, if anything, such measures would only make matters worse by making it harder for the right people to buy guns for self-defense, rather than indifference to the issue.
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Here is the full transcript:
CNN Newsroom
April 3, 2021
6:48 p.m. Eastern
PAMELA BROWN: We saw more than 600 mass shootings in 2020. According to Time magazine, that’s 50 percent more than 2019, and the most in the past five years. But those mass shootings accounting for just a fraction of all the violent gun deaths in America. Gun Violence Archive Research Group says more than 19,000 people were killed in 2020 — the most in two decades. If you add in suicide by gun, the number eclipses 43,000. That means more than 100 people are dying from guns every single day in America.
So while the debate over assault weapons and the discussion of preventing mass shootings are crucial parts of stopping this plague, they are still just the tip of the iceberg. Immediately after the Boulder shooting, President Biden promised quick action — not the first President to do so. For the record, he has yet to introduce legislation or to sign an executive order on guns even though, right now, you could still go to his campaign website and see that dozens of gun control initiatives he promises to enact as President.
Meanwhile, in Congress, the House passed a pair of background check bills, but, as always seems to be the case on this issue, they are now languishing in the Senate. Just this year, the U.S. has already suffered more than 10,000 gun violence deaths. How many more thousands of Americans will die before more is done to break the cycle?
Nicole Hockley joins me now from Newtown, Connecticut. She lost her son Dylan in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, and she is the co-founder of the Sandy Hook Promise group that looks to end gun violence. … So, as I mentioned, President Biden has yet to send a gun control bill to Congress. He has signed dozens of executive orders, but zero dealing with guns so far, and, a couple of months into his administration, he says that his presidency is about timing. Do you think the time is now for for him to act on guns?
NICOLE HOCKLEY
