On Tuesday's MTP Daily, MSNBC host Chuck Todd gave former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of the Labor Party an unchallenged forum to promote a semi-automatic gun ban in the U.S. similar to the one enacted in his home country after an infamous mass shooting attack in 1996.
No mention was made of any analysis that questions whether the gun ban actually did have a downward impact on violent crime.
Todd began the segment by again relying on one of the liberal student activists for information about gun control as a student was seen claiming that, after a school shooting in Australia, the country's government enacted laws that reduced the number of school shootings to zero in the years since.
Although Todd did correct the liberal activist about the year actually being 1996 instead of 1999, he did not inform viewers that it was not, in fact, a school shooting that occurred. Additionally, there have been a number of mass killings, including shootings, over the years since the gun ban, including at least one mass shooting at a university in 2002.
After noting that a conservative prime minister enacted strict gun control, Todd wondered if, in spite of the NRA and the Second Amendment in the U.S., "Australia's model could still have some legs in the United States, say, on semi-automatic weapons or something like that."
He then brought aboard the former Prime Minister and gave little pushback on whether a gun ban would be a good idea as he promoted more gun control in the U.S., where the former prime minster now resides. He asserted that "you've got to do something directly about automatic and semi-automatic weapons," and then predicted that the Supreme Court would not object to semi-automatic guns being banned.
Todd mildly pushed back by bringing up the Heller decision and the argument that guns could not be banned legally, leading his guest to claim in response that the U.S. allows weapons that were meant to be military weapons.
After the MSNBC host brought up the issue of some Americans not trusting the government to keep them safe, asking how Australia dealt with that issue, the former prime minister called such sentiments a "deep cancer" Rudd:
I think in this country you've suffered from sort of half a century of government bashing where government equals evil equals bad, and therefore we can't trust them with anything. I mean, that is s deep cancer in this society which you can turn around.
Concluding the interview, Todd gushed: "I always love getting a perspective on us from the outside, people going, 'Why aren't you tackling this?'"
Rudd ended by praising the U.S. but calling the availability of guns "nuts." Rudd: "Yeah, but we like this country. There are so many good things in America -- this is just nuts."
