Dr. Sebastian Gorka, chief strategist for the MAGA Coalition, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about the Las Vegas shooting, the possible motivations of the killer, and the call for new gun control legislation in the aftermath.
Gorka disdained conspiracy theories but said “something does not add up about the attack in Las Vegas.”
“I think the local law enforcement are clearly under immense pressure. The under-sheriff who spoke recently was doing a sterling job. But the lack of information coming out about this, the largest shooting incident in modern U.S. history, is just galling and disturbing,” he said.
Gorka advised carefully watching the CBS News interview with Eric Paddock, brother of gunman Stephen Paddock. He called it “the most peculiar interview in modern televised history,” a “systematic 33-minute whitewashing of a mass murderer.”
“Talking about how he’s just a normal guy, how much he loved his girlfriend, this is the kind of tender individual he was – watch the way he speaks. Watch his body language. A body language expert has already analyzed it with a very, very pejorative analysis of whether this man was telling the truth,” said Gorka.
“At the end of the day, do you know what the weirdest thing is? We know nothing of this man’s politics. How is that possible?” he asked.
Addressing repeated claims by the Islamic State that Stephen Paddock was a convert to Islam and one of its “soldiers,” Gorka noted that “never in the history of mankind – never – has an upstanding citizen on Monday decided on Tuesday to kill 59 people.”
“It happens over time. This is a process, whether it’s a psychotic break, or whether it is the process of radicalization into a terrorist group – be it secular, be it right-wing, left-wing, jihadi,” he elaborated. “This takes time. It takes months, sometimes years. The idea there were no indicators from within his family, from within his associates, from within the people he sat down and played poker with, is absolutely out of the question.”
“The fact that, to this day, we have no reports of people who saw something and thought it was suspicious, that can tell us which direction he went in – whether it’s political, psychological, or religious – it just stinks to high heaven,” he said.
On the gun control debate that erupted after the Las Vegas shooting, Gorka drew on his own firearms expertise to point out that a bump stock – the devices allegedly used by the killer to fire semi-automatic rifles at near-automatic speed – is little more than a “piece of plastic” that makes the weapon fire more quickly by taking advantage of its recoil to squeeze the trigger faster than human muscles allow.
“It doesn’t change the mechanism of a weapon, and that is why the ATF deemed it to be wholly legal,” he said. “You can do the bump-fire effect without a bump-fire stock. You can hook your thumb into your belt, put your finger in the trigger, and bump the weapon off your finger. Go on YouTube and watch a dozen videos on what bump-firing is. This is just a cheap piece of plastic that allows you to effect something you can do without it in any case.”
Gorka warned that “if you allow the camel’s nose into the tent on bump-fire stocks” by passing legislation against them, “then you have capitulated to the argument that the object itself is the problem, the inanimate object.”
“This is what the left has told us for decades – that it’s not somebody with a will to kill, be they a terrorist, be they a psychotic. It’s this thing, this gun or this addition to a gun. If we give into that now, then it’s over, and people like Feinstein and Schumer will just have a field day with this,” he said.
Gorka repeated what a “very senior member of the NRA” told him earlier in the morning: “We will fight any ban or confiscation scheme with the strongest possible resistance.”
“You can see perhaps potential virtue signaling in terms of some media interpretations, but after what Wayne LaPierre has done, after the fights – remember, what did they say after Newtown? Do you remember? They said the NRA is dead. They’re toast. He’s gone. The whole thing is going to cave. They didn’t. They doubled down, and they fought for our rights. I think now we double down again, and we say, ‘Guys, we’re not going to give into this, and, in fact, reciprocity is what we’re going to demand from the Congress because this is what we need,’” he said.
Dr. Sebastian Gorka is a former deputy assistant to President Trump and former National Security editor for Breitbart News.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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