Republican presidential candidate and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush stated that while there isn’t a “national federal government solution” on guns, it would be “appropriate” to keep people on the No-Fly List from buying guns, but “you would have to narrow it down to the point where it was clearly, there’s an active investigation of something like that” on Thursday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel.
Jeb stated, “the first impulse I would have, rather than talking about gun control, is to make sure that we protect the homeland, and, last week, the metadata program was ended, on November 30th, and I think it ought to be restored. there was apparently some tracking of if he was radicalized, there were suspects that were being followed by the FBI. And this is the job of the president, it isn’t to turn every instance into a need for taking rights away from people that are law-abiding citizens. We need to protect the homeland. And I think every aspect of how we go about that, while we protect civil liberties in this country ought to be used.”
He was then asked, “Should something be done on the issue of guns, put this issue aside?” He responded, “I don’t think so. I don’t think that there’s a national federal government solution to this. The issue of th[is] mass violence, which is so tragic, it really breaks everyone’s heart, ought to be, you know, the main thing that we’ve seen up until now is mental illness. And we could do better probably identifying people before they go completely out of control, but there’s — this impulse to always solve a problem in Washington, DC typically ends up taking rights away from law-abiding people.
Later, Jeb was asked [relevant exchange begins around 11:15] “Do you think that if somebody’s name is on a no-fly list that they should be able to get a gun?”
He responded, “If that no-fly list is a concise list, yeah. I think that that would be an appropriate qualifier.”
He added, “the No-Fly List is not a concise list that — of people under investigation, or they may be for a short period of time. But if you, if you narrowed that down from that list to people that are being investigated in an active way, yeah that would be appropriate.”
Jeb further said, “you would have to narrow it down to the point where it was clearly, there’s an active investigation of something like that. But, that’s not going to be the answer. the answer is going to be that we have to identify people before they come to the country. Or identify them if they’re communicating with known terrorists outside the country, and there’s ways to do that and protect civil liberties in this country, and we need to get back to that business.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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