On Saturday's MSNBC Live, weekend anchor Richard Lui provided an unchallenged forum for 17-year-old Houston city council candidate Marcel McClinton to advocate for more gun control.
The MSNBC host also suggested that Illinois is better off than Texas because it has more stringent gun laws and a higher grade from an anti-gun group, but he did not notice that the murder rate for Illinois in recent years has been significantly higher than in Texas.
At 4:51 p.m. Eastern, after running a brief acknowledging that Illinois mass shooter Gary Martin was already under current law supposed to have been barred from purchasing the murder weapon because of his criminal history, Lui still dived into a segment promoting even more gun control as he recalled that some become politically active after experiencing a shooting.
As he set up the interview with McClinton -- who is technically running as nonpartisan even though he has a history of working with Democrats -- Lui mentioned gun control activist and Georgia Democratic Congresswoman Lucy McBath as someone who was inspired to go into political activism after a gun-related tragedy. Here's Lui:
People personally affected by gun violence, they tend to respond to these events in a variety of ways. Some take to the streets and protest ... some call the politicians who represent them, and then a select few, they just decide to get up and take political office themselves and try to win.
Well, take for instance, freshman Congresswoman Lucy McBath of Georgia. She was inspired to run after losing her teenage son, Jordan, in a 2012 shooting. And then there's this young man. Marcel McClinton is a 17-year-old shooting survivor, a co-organizer of March for Our Lives in Houston, and a nonpartisan candidate running for a seat on Houston's city council.
After starting by discussing a mass shooting his guest survived, and how McClinton decided to become politically active, Lui displayed a map on screen showing high grades given to states with more gun control. Although the source was not given, it apparently came from the website for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence which advocates for more gun control.
Lui recalled: "Let's look at the annual gun law scorecard, and when you look at the states across the country -- specifically as I was talking about Illinois a second ago -- gets a B. When you look at Texas, gets an F."
As the MSNBC host lauded Illinois for being awarded a better grade than Texas from the anti-gun group, he did not mention that the murder rate for Texas is actually significantly lower than it is for Illinois (5.3 versus 8.2 per 100,000 in 2016), and the overall violent crime rate, while very close, is slightly lower in Texas.
Nevertheless, McClinton dumped on his home state of Texas and claimed that it had "failed" on gun laws in spite of the state having a lower murder rate than Illinois.
