During the January 3 airing of Meet the Press, gun control proponent Mark Kelly said “middle-aged white men” with decreased life expectancy are clinging to guns.
He also described ardent gun owners and gun rights supporters as residents of “middle America” who “make less money than they used to,” and therefore fear that everything is slipping away.
Kelly’s comments came after host Chuck Todd talked about the difference between “the gun culture in rural America” and the way guns are viewed by those in the northeast, who are more accepting of big government and accustomed to a police officer on every street corner.
Todd applied this to the chasm that exists between Obama and rural gun owners, saying, “I know that you want to try to get the east coast, or urban America, to understand the gun culture in rural America. How do you translate that to the president?”
Kelly responded:
The president and I have talked about this. When you look at places in middle America, people who make less money than they used to. I mean, I just saw this blog entry by [CNN’s] Fareed Zakaria the other day, that the one area is middle-aged white men where life expectancy is going down. So you have this segment of society that just feels like they’re losing things, and they look at gun issues and their right to own a gun as one of those things that they might be losing.
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