On Thursday’s CBS Mornings, co-host and Kamala Harris donor Gayle King reacted to Wednesday’s deadly shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia by continuing her decade-plus crusade for mass gun control, arguing this time the deaths of two students and two teachers was proof Americans believe “it’s okay to kill kids” since nothing’s been “done to stop” school shootings.
King began the show by quibbling with the local sheriff’s declaration that “hate will not prevail” by insisting there’s “a lot of hate, it seems, in this country” as evidenced by “another American community reeling from deadly gun violence.”
“I just keep thinking, we all think this, how many more stories do we have to report like this? I don’t want us ever to become desensitized to it. I thought Vice President Harris said it right, it doesn’t have to be this way,” King later said after having heard from a student who lost his algebra teacher.
Chief campaign and election correspondent Robert Costa followed, huffing that Wednesday “was supposed to be about kitchen table issues and courting voters in battleground states, but..outrage and revived debates over gun violence have also now been thrust into this campaign.”
After Costa cartoonishly insisted another political headline of Liz Cheney endorsing Harris would be “pretty significant” moment come November, King turned back to guns by admitting “[i]t’s so hard for me to focus on anything other than the shooting. I have to say, guys.”
She then leveled her despicable charge: “It is very difficult for me right now. It’s hard for me to accept the fact that we live in a country where I guess we think it’s okay to kill children, because if we didn’t think it was okay, something would be done to stop it, and it doesn’t seem to matter who’s in office[.]”
Co-host Nate Burleson agreed by saying “[s]omething would have been done a long time ago.” How or what that would thwart shootings was not provided.
Co-host Tony Dokoupil gave his two cents that one would have hoped the country had long been able to have “find a compromise that enshrines the Second Amendment, but keeps our children safe.”
Like all ardent gun control advocates, King insisted she doesn’t “want to take guns from responsible gun owners.”
In the second hour, King doubled down during an interview with Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), whose wife and former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) was nearly killed in a January 2011 shooting.
King first asked what Kelly feels and thinks whenever he hears about a mass shooting, which gave Kelly room to promptly discard “the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which is going to expand background checks and do a number of other things on this issue” as not enough.
Showing her lack of depth, King proclaimed: “But we all say this, we hear people say we got to do more. We all say we’re strong, we all say love overrules, hate doesn’t win. And then it happens again, and again, and again.”
“Yes, so we’re in this vicious mourn, pray, repeat cycle and it’s so frustrating to me because we all keep hearing the same thing and nothing changes,” she huffed.
Kelly argued this comes down to Americans supporting candidates who support “background checks” and “safer communities”, but King lamented many Americans (read: Republicans) oppose that and thus they “think it’s okay to kill kids at school.”
A search of the NewsBusters archives revealed over a dozen examples of King calling for some form of gun control or casting vile aspersions on the American people.
The most vile example came in May 2022 after the slaughter inside Uvalde Elementary School when she smeared millions by saying certain “people just don’t want to do what needs to be done” to remove “assault rifles” from our country because “nobody needs” one and stop “blam[ing] [shootings] on the mental health” (click “expand”):
[T]here is something that can be done. People just don’t want to do what needs to be done. There is — I don’t even know how we can continue to watch this happen time after time after time, and say that it’s okay for these assault rifles to be on the streets, and now blame it on mental health. I don’t care who you are. Nobody needs an assault rifle in this country, unless you are a trained professional. It just doesn’t make any sense. So when we say there’s nothing we can do, that’s just not true and the pain that that man felt, I saw him say, you know, she was such a good girl. You know, she brushed her teeth every day. I mean, that was such a relatable, and such a thing that as parents, we all know, when we all rejoice. This pain is too much. This pain is too much. And we keep hearing this, too. Maybe this will be the time, maybe this will be the time. I have to keep holding onto that.
In May 2023, King lectured Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) that “it’s no longer a matter if” you’ll become a mass shooting victim, but “a matter of when” and falsely claimed “guns are still the leading cause of death for children.”
A month and a half earlier, King claimed after the Covenant School shooting that the country would be better off if Republicans banned “assault rifles” instead of “banning books”.
“I’ve come to the point, and it’s difficult to think that, that we live in a country where, apparently, we value guns over children. We value guns over the lives of fellow human beings,” she exclaimed.
Rewinding to 2022, King said on at least three occasions (here, here, and here) that the Second Amendment was only intended for muskets, thus claiming (and falsely so) that the Constitution allows for Congress to outright ban all sorts of firearms.
On May 25, 2022, she huffed she was convinced “when the Founding Fathers wrote that they were talking about muskets” and thus would support her calls to ban “assault rifles.” This has been such a long-held view of hers we found her as having said this back in 2015. That time, she claimed too many people own….AK-47s.
She’s made all kinds of other arguments in her time at CBS in the AM. In 2013, she questioned whether gun manufacturers put profits over “human lives”. Two years later, she blasted then-Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) for opposing her style of gun control despite being a father. By December 2015, she claimed (vague) gun control measures would prevent mass shootings. And, in March 2019, she suggested the U.S. take New Zealand’s approach of mandatory, mass gun confiscation.
To see the relevant CBS transcript from September 5, click here.
