I still plan to vote for him in our Presidential primary but I must state my disappointment on Bernie Sanders refusal, when given a prime opportunity, to come out forcefully for sensible gun laws beyond background checks.
In his interview with Chris Hayes, Chris served up a softball to him in terms of allowing him to explicitly state his support for common sense gun laws such as the ones passed in Australia and Great Britain
UK
any person possessing a firearm in the U.K. must posses a Shotgun Certificate or a Firearm Certificate.
Machine guns, pepper spray, semi-automatic, and pump-action rifles, and any firearm that has a barrel less than 30 centimeters in length are prohibited.
Australia
Pro-gun Conservative John Howard pushed through an ambitious gun control program. The laws banned all automatic and semi-automatic weapons and instituted strict licensing rules involving background checks and waiting periods for purchases.
The conservative government also instituted a buyback program, where people were paid for turning in newly illegal automatic and semi-automatic rifles
We all know how successful these laws have been in preventing needless gun deaths and injuries.
Yet, when offered an opportunity to support a similar law for the United States, on the day of yet another mass shooting, Bernie deferred and would not step up to back passage.
HAYES: There`s two things about this. One is it strikes me is, you
know, it may prove to be a more difficult policy problem than we`re
prepared to admit about keeping guns out of the hands of the wrong people.
And it may be that that isn`t enough, the sort of items that you`ve
indicated, that if we need to take a more robust approach like, say, in
Australia or England, which the president mentioned today.
SANDERS: Well, I don`t -- you know, I don`t know that anybody knows
what the magic solution is. What we do know is the current situation is
not tenable. It is clearly not working. And as the president indicated,
we can and must do a lot better.
So, I believe -- but I`ll tell you what else I believe. You can sit
there and say I think we should do this and do that. But you`ve got a
whole lot of states in this country where people want virtually no gun
control at all. And if we are going to have some success we are going to
have to start talking to each other.
....
And the fact we have folks in Congress who don`t even want us to get
information about shootings in this country and fatalities, that`s pretty
crazy stuff.
So, I think the job is to bring people together and say, yes, we`ve
got to move forward, we`ve got to move forward aggressively, stop the
shouting and let`s work together to do something that`s realistic.
Fuck 'realistic'.
Who would say before January it is 'realistic' to believe a man that self-describes himself as a democratic socialist could be elected President of the United States?
As President Obama rightfully said yesterday it's time to politicize this issue.
Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.
I would ask news organizations — because I won’t put these facts forward — have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side-by-side on your news reports. This won’t be information coming from me; it will be coming from you. We spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths.
How can that be?
And it will never change unless we stop being realistic and start using politics to end these massacres.