Sunday morning on NBC’s Meet the Press, moderator Chuck Todd ended the first half hour by discussing gun control with his guests, in the wake of last week’s massacre in Las Vegas.The panel was aghast at the “new normal” of gun violence, with one panelist suggesting the answer was to confiscate guns from citizens altogether.
That panelist was Eugene Robinson, columnist and associate editor for the Washington Post, who argued that what America needed to do was look at the amount of guns we have in the country already as the real problem. Robinson suggested that the only way to solve the problem of gun violence was to follow Australia’s method of gun confiscation.
Doing something like a mandatory gun “buyback” program would have a real “impact” on gun violence, Robinson argued. “That’s what the debate ought to be,” he concluded:
No, it's not going to stop. These things happen, they're awful, they're tragic. And then we start the gun debate non-debate. One reason it's a non-debate is that we debate what specific piece of legislation could have stopped this incident. And you can never put your finger on it. And therefore you can't talk about any piece of legislation that might have stopped the last one or might stop the next one.
Meanwhile, there are 300 million guns in this country. And so a real gun debate has to look at that fact. 300 million guns. We need to, you know, look at what was done in a place like Australia where they had a gun buyback. Gun control is permissible according to the Supreme Court. If Congress were to decide, it won't happen, were to decide, that automatic assault rifles, long guns are something that -- military style weapons, are something that citizens should not have, they should be police and military only and we're going to buy them back, that would have an impact. It’s not going to happen, but that would have an impact and that’s what the debate ought to be.
Unfortunately, this suggestion isn’t new, it’s been referenced by many media pundits over the years as a solution to gun violence. In the wake of San Bernardino in 2015, CBS hailed the country had “no Second Amendment” so they could “ban certain firearms after massacres.”
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and even President Obama also praised Australia for taking its citizens guns away, while Brzezinski urged we should also adopt the mandatory buyback.
