Kentucky Senator and Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul criticized some in the media for skipping “important facts” like the fact that “California has some of the strictest gun control laws in the whole country” and accused the president of wanting “to make this political, when the reality is this is a human tragedy first” on Thursday’s “America’s Newsroom” on the Fox News Channel.
Rand said, “when we have these tragedies, the first thing I think that we ought to think about is the victims, and that they were people, they were someone’s brother, someone’s sister, someone’s mother. And I guess what gets me is that so often we immediately go and jump to — the president at least, jumps and wants to make this political, when the reality is this is a human tragedy first.”
He added, “the sad thing about those people who want to mock religion and want to mock prayer is that we don’t even yet know all about this. It turns out that both of these terrorists, or murderers are Muslim. Do we know that they’re radical Islamists? do we know where they came from, how they got here? Until we have an investigation of this, for someone to mock someone who sincerely believes that prayer is something that we do in times of need. The other thing is is that some of the victims were actually tweeting out pray for us, pray for our safety. And if this were some — a member of my family, that’s what I would be doing, praying for their safety, knowing that I physically couldn’t remove them from harm. But for people to mock religion, to mock prayer and then to act as if there’s some law that’s going to fix this. You know, there may well be, but it may not be a gun control law. It may well be a law that says we shouldn’t admit people to this country from certain parts of the world where they’re intent on killing us. And so until we know exactly what happened here, for people to be snide, snotty, and arrogant about the fact that they believe prayer doesn’t influence our lives. I’m offended by it, and quite frankly shocked by that kind of attitude.”
Rand also stated, “I was watching one of the competing channels. The competing channel was only talking about gun control, and did not mention that the attackers were Islamic, or that they were loaded with bombs and dozens of guns and weapons, as if it were a terrorist attack. And so it wasn’t even being mentioned, all that’s being talked about is gun control, and yet they skip over important facts, that oftentimes, the guns have been registered or purchased legally, and that California has some of the strictest gun control laws in the whole country. So, I think it’s a big mistake for the president, it’s a big mistake for liberals in general to mock people of religion, and to mock people who believe in prayer. But I think it’s also a big mistake to immediately politicize something.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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