While discussing the ongoing manhunt for the second suspect behind the bombing of the Boston Marathon, Chris Wallace -- the host of Fox News Sunday -- linked the Monday terrorist attack with the debate on gun rights currently going on across the country.
Pointing to the fact that most of the region is in a tight lockdown due to the search for 26-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Wallace asked how many people in the area “do you think, might like a gun to be able to protect themselves and defend their homes?”
“All the people in that Watertown neighborhood, hiding, doors locked,” he told Bill Hemmer, a co-host of the channel's morning America's Newsroom program, wondering how many are “worried that this guy might get into their home, maybe take them hostage.”
“That feeds into the gun debate that we’ve had here in Washington,” Wallace said.
“To be realistic,” he added, “the extraordinary story of the last decade is not that” terrorists are still out there, “it's how incredibly successful, and in some cases, lucky we've been.”
“But as so many people from the Bush Administration have said, we have to be right and effective 100 percent of the time,” Wallace noted. “They only have to be right or lucky once, and in this case, they were.”
He then stated that Tsarnaev and his 19-year-old brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev -- who was killed earlier in the day during an encounter with police -- were successful because “they were hiding in plain sight.”
The newsman then complimented the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for tracking down the bombers even though “they looked like thousands of other people on the streets of Boston that day.”
“Yes, we didn't stop it ahead of time,” Wallace said before praising the fact that “in 48, 72 hours,” the federal agents “were able to identify and put pictures of these two people on the screen.”
Wallace’s take on the recent discussion of gun control was quite a bit different from the rest of the media’s. Many journalists have been visibly angered at that the gun bill backed by Democrats and President Obama went down to defeat in the Senate.
