During the July 10 airing of Face the Nation, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings (D) criticized the state of Texas’s open carry laws.
Breitbart News previously reported that President Obama took a similar tack on July 9, when he responded to the Dallas Police ambush by criticizing Texas open carry laws and tying police safety to more gun control.
Rawlings’s criticism of Texas gun laws came in response to host John Dickerson’s focus on “others arrested immediately afterwards on the scene” of Thursday’s attack. Dickerson asked, “What can you tell us about those arrests?”
Rawlings replied:
Kind of dealing with the law of gun holding, you can carry a rifle legally. And when you have gunfire going on, you usually go with the person that’s got a gun. And so our police grabbed some of those individuals, took them to police headquarters, and worked it out and figured out that they were not the shooters. But that is one of the real issues with the gun right issues that we face. In the middle of a firefight, it’s hard to pick out the good guys and the bad guys.
Dickerson asked Rawlings if open carry “complicated the issue at the moment,” and Rawling said, “I think so.”
Rawlings added:
I wasn’t there real time to kind of see it go on, but common sense would tell you, you don’t know where the gunfire’s coming from. There are individuals that ran across the gunfire, they were in body armor, camo gear with rifles slung across their shoulders. And they took our eye off the ball for a moment. We got them out of the way, we figured out what was happening, and we did our business.
Texas has allowed the open carry of rifles for decades.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
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