During the March 13 CNN Democrat Town Hall in Ohio, Hillary Clinton responded to a question about gang-related gun violence by pushing stricter gun control for law-abiding citizens.
She was responding to comments from questioner Vashitta Johnson, who talked about a seven-year-old boy being killed and his five-year-old and four-year old siblings being wounded in a gang-related attack. The questioner was clear: “This incident was actually a gang-related retaliation shooting.” She also mentioned a shooting in which another five-year-old was shot while lying in his bed, then asked, “What programs would you implement in poverty-stricken communities in this country in an effort to decrease this type of violence?”
Clinton then responded to the question of gang-related violence in the same way she has responded to any question about guns throughout this campaign cycle. She claimed “90 people a day are killed by guns in our country,” and she said “a shocking number of those killed are children.” She then pushed for “comprehensive background checks” — the same types of background checks they have in California, Colorado, and Paris — and called for “[cracking] down on the makers and sellers of guns.”
She said gun makers have to be held “accountable for the use of their products.”
A few points need to be made here. Number one, Breitbart News previously reported that Clinton’s claims that “90 people a day are killed by guns” in America is baseless. She literally adds suicides into “gun violence” numbers to swell firearm-related deaths by 66 percent. This opens the door for her to talk about “33,000” Americans killed by guns each year — as she did Sunday night — instead of looking at the approximate 10,000 to 11,000 Americans killed annually via firearm-related aggression, much of which is the kind of gang-related violence witnessed in Chicago and other cities with strict gun control.
On top of this, Clinton pushes for “comprehensive background checks,” which are the very checks that are already in place in California, Colorado, and Paris — the locations of the most high-profile mass shootings and/or shooting sprees that occurred October through December of 2015. Three were shot and killed on Halloween Day 2015 in Colorado Springs, 130 were shot and killed during the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, three were shot at killed at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs on November 27, and 14 were shot and killed in San Bernardino on December 2. Comprehensive backgrounds were not even a hindrance to these attacks.
And Clinton’s suggestion that we should hold gun manufacturers and sellers liable for the criminal misuse of their products is simply a recipe for eliminating gun manufacturers and sellers in America. How long would knife makers last if held liable for the criminal misuse of their products? How long would hammer makers, baseball bat manufacturers, or car companies last?
This is why Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders warned of the dangers of Clinton’s approach during the previous Democratic debate, when he said that if we start going after gun companies whose products are sold “to a person who buys it legally, what you’re really talking about is ending gun manufacturing in America.”
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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