On this weekend’s broadcast of, “Fox News Sunday,” while discussing the mass shooting in Florida that killed 50 and injured over 50 more, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) predicted “more of these attacks” were coming.
Partial transcript as follows:
BAIER: I want to get your reaction first to this breaking news out of Florida, and all that we’re hearing approximately 20 dead and what we’re hearing from authorities so far in this investigation.
SESSIONS: Well, it certainly looks like another one of the extremist attacks, Islamic extremism. Just within the wonderful group of Islamic people are a certain group of radicals and it’s been there for a long time and it seems to be growing. And we have to accept that fact, we have to be cautious about it. Our committee, my subcommittee this week just concluded that we’ve had over 570 individuals either convicted or charged or connected to terrorism since 9/11.
BAIER: Five hundred seventy. This is the Judiciary Committee report, that 570 convicted or indicted since 9/11.
SESSIONS: Since 9/11. And it’s not stopping. We see apparently today more of these attacks are coming. It’s a real part of the threat that we face, and if we can’t address it openly and directly and say directly that there is an extremist element within Islam that’s dangerous to the world and has to be confronted, we need to slow down and be careful about those we admit into the country.
We know about two-thirds and we haven’t completed it yet, but about two-thirds of those people that were charged were foreign born, almost all Islamic individuals.
So, it’s a serious matter. I wish it weren’t so. I wish there were some easy solution, but there’s not. We have to be more vigilant.
BAIER: Authorities are cautious. This is early. We don’t know who this person is. At least we don’t know publicly.
It was interesting to hear the FBI answer a question about Islamic ideology, saying that this person had leanings toward that ideology, but the investigation continues. You seem to be making that jump already, that I don’t know if authorities are there yet. But it did seem like they went further than we usually hear at the beginning of these investigations.
SESSIONS: That’s what I took it to be. I think pretty clearly the FBI knew what they were saying. But maybe not. We don’t have conclusive proof, you’re correct about that.
It certainly shows, again, the reluctance of them to actually say the words “Islamic extremism” or “Islamic terrorism”. Of course most Islamic citizens and visitors to America are not violent, but there clearly is a problem here.
BAIER: This comes — and usually this — an incident like this, a mass shooting, eventually the discussion quickly goes to guns and this comes about a week after Hillary Clinton on a Sunday show seemed to have an issue getting to the answer definitively that an individual’s right to bear arms is a constitutional right. You’ve talked about that and her trouble in answering that question.
SESSIONS: The Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. If her view and the Heller court were to be reversed what that would mean is — and this is what she said she favors — it would mean that any city, county or state could completely ban the use of firearms in America. It would be the greatest evisceration of the protections of the Second Amendment since the founding of the republic. It was 5-4 in the Supreme Court. Scalia was the fifth vote. Now that he has passed away, the next president will appoint the fifth vote. If she is elected president, count on it. She will appoint a judge who will declare it not to be a personal right, guaranteed against any state, federal and local government, but would say that it could be constricted by local governments and that would be a huge thing.
BAIER: You know, she says and her campaign says that’s way over the line as far as where she is.
SESSIONS: Bret, it’s not. Imagine the cities in America that would immediately if had the power would ban firearms in their cities. Washington, D.C. had to have a federal court overrule their ban of all firearms in Washington. This is not an extreme position. It’s absolute fact. Heller is the only thing that protects us, it was 5-4 and it could flip 5-4 the other way if she appoints the next justice.
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