On CBS’ This Morning on Friday, Marco Rubio faced Charlie Rose, Gayle King, and Norah O’Donnell, who confronted him on gun control and demanded answers about why he, as a Republican, continued to block it in the Senate.
Rose pressed Rubio on why he failed to vote for an amendment in the Senate on expanding background checks, and King challenged him for failing to answer President Obama’s call for more gun control.
Rubio told King that expanded background checks would not have stopped the attack in California. King admitted he was right but insisted that more gun laws would help stop mass shootings.
“No,” Rubio replied. “None of the major shootings that have occurred in this country over the last few months or years that have outraged us would gun laws have prevented.”
He reminded the group that violence was up all over the country, including non-gun crimes.
“If you look at it more broadly, I think the fundamental question needs to be: why is there so much violence in America? And it is a combination of cultural changes that have occurred in our country and mental health issues, as well,” he said.
When O’Donnell challenged Rubio on background checks for the so-called gun show loophole, he pointed out that the laws were merely burdensome for private individuals making private sales.
“What they are trying to do now would not solve any of these problems and, in fact, would impede the Second Amendment right of a large number of Americans,” he said.
He continued:
As an individual, I decide I want to sell my gun to a friend of mine. So now, you put an extraordinary burden on me to go out and conduct a background check, and I’m liable if I get it wrong. As an individual, it’s just very difficult to implement and almost impossible to enforce and ignores the fact that despite the background checks we are seeing now, people are still getting access to these weapons.
Rubio also spoke about gun control on Fox News Friday morning, challenging the left for pushing their talking points in the wake of the attack in California.
“When this first came out–without knowing anything about the case–the first thing they started talking about was gun control, gun control,” Rubio said. “I don’t hear anybody talking about bomb control. They put bombs and left bombs behind on the scene of attack, intending to kill even more people than they did with guns.”
Thursday on Fox News, the Florida Senator also spoke out against the left’s push for more gun control:
I think the left often pivots to gun laws, but the truth is, states like California, for example, have very strict gun laws, as they do in Illinois and Chicago, as they do in Washington, D.C., as they do in many other jurisdictions that have significant amount[s] of gun violence. So, it’s never been shown that these gun laws are effective, other than in keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens.
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