From the Things Hacks Say department: on Monday night's All In, in a discussion of the rock-concert shootings in the Paris terrorist attacks, MSNBC’s Joy Reid claimed that the National Rifle Association doesn’t care at all about the loss of life in shootings, and only wants to sell more guns.
Host Chris Hayes suggested from a devil’s-advocate position that when the NRA protested an effort to prevent people on the government’s terrorist watch list from purchasing guns, it might demonstrate “integrity” in maintaining their gun-rights position. Reid replied “there's nothing in the NRA's behavior that indicates they care about anything other than maximizing gun sales.”
JOY REID: We look at the, you know, really deadly and horrific massacres we've seen in this country. If you then replace the characters who did them, who are white American males, with Muslims, you would have a whole different sort of category of fear that would happen in the country. I just think it's an interesting thought experiment that when you give the NRA the option between these maximalist positions on gun control or on not having gun control and the potential to exercise Islamophobia or nativism that, you know, they still come down on the side of these maximalist positions. And you do wonder what would the scenario be where they would support gun control? Because in the past the NRA has supported gun control.
CHRIS HAYES: Okay. But isn't that a strike in their favor, right? Doesn't that say, like, wasn't that -- what you just said, doesn't that say the NRA is an organization with tremendous integrity. Right, because they're not going to pander?
REID: Except that there's nothing in the NRA's behavior that indicates they care about anything other than maximizing gun sales. They have not demonstrated in any way a sort of care about, you know, the individual liberties of Muslim Americans that might be on the list. They just want to sell a lot of guns.
It's a little like someone telling Joy Reid that Black Lives Matter lobbyists don't care about the lives of policemen at all, and don't care about the lives lost and property damaged in rioting. Wouldn't she see that position as a little harsh?
Hayes concluded the segment with this opinion: “the policy lesson of what happened in Paris, which is horrifying, is that guns are really dangerous and they were the most deadly weapon. There were these very complicated suicide vests that were essentially used just to kill the assailants, but what killed people were the guns. And that's something that hangs over all of us in a country with the amount of guns we have.”
