ABC's Donaldson: Gun Owners Will Just ‘Shoot the Paperboy’

During a roundtable conversation on the April 22 edition of "This Week," veteran ABC journalists Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson echoed boilerplate liberal positions on two separate issues. Discussing the recent Supreme Court decision upholding a congressional ban on partial-birth-abortion, Roberts said she found it "offensive as a woman."

But first, George Will spoke about the Virginia Tech massacre and the fact that armed individuals have prevented slaughters in the past. Roberts derisively responded, "Well, I don't want the shootout at the OK Corral going on at any college campus..."

Later in the program, Will again described how Americans defend themselves with guns. Donaldson rejected the idea by suggesting Americans might shoot their paperboy:

George Will: "Furthermore, Sam, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta studies violence as a public health problem and studies it with the tools of epidemiology. And it has discovered among other interesting things that every year hundreds of thousands of Americans use the weapons they own, one in three households in America has a weapon in it, to deter home invaders. Now–"

Sam Donaldson: "And to shoot the paperboy and the relative coming home late at night."

Cokie Roberts: "That's the real problem is the–"

Will: "That is not a real problem."

Roberts: "–The drunken husband is the real problem with the gun."

Later in the segment, which aired at 10:33am on April 22, the journalists debated the abortion ruling made by the Supreme Court last Wednesday. The panel, which also included "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos, went through the political ramifications of the deicison. It was at this point that Roberts discussed the issue personally and asserted that she found the opinion of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote for the 5-4 majority, "offensive as a woman." Stephanopoulos helpfully wondered whether she found it "a little paternalistic?"

Roberts: "And Justice Kennedy's opinion I found, frankly, offensive as a woman."

George Stephanopoulos: "A little paternalistic?"

Roberts: "But it was saying that, you know, women would be protected from regrets later in life. You know, there are lots of moral decisions people make all through their lives where they regret them and the idea that the court is going to stop that for women is something that I think is, is just offensive."