Friday night, on The Rachel Maddow Show, guest host Illinois Congressman Luis Gutierrez from the fourth congressional district told guest host Melissa Harris-Perry that he believed handguns should be banned. Harris-Perry asked, “What needs to be done if you’ve already got the laws in place and you still have this sort of murder rate?”
Gutierrez replied:
It’s so porous, right? The guns just filter through to the city of Chicago. And you know the first thing I supported back in 1993, twenty years ago, when I first arrived in Congress with such fervor, was the assault weapons ban, and I remember when we extended it. But you know, Melissa, on Monday, I worked all day today thinking about that same question, so we’re gonna have some faith-based leaders come and meet with me on Monday, and we’re gonna get some victims, survivors of gun violence, we’re gonna meet with them, we’re gonna talk to them and we’re gonna start, also begin to focus on, as you said, handguns. I went, and I was astonished. There were 351 people murdered with guns in 2011 in Chicago. 361 of them, I mean … 351 of the 361 were handguns, 97%. It’s clear that we need to look at handguns also.
Gutierrez was given a grade of “F” from the NRA; he voted against prohibiting product misuse lawsuits on gun manufacturers, voted against prohibiting suing gunmakers & sellers for gun misuse, and voted against decreasing the gun waiting period from 3 days to 1.