Second-Amendment champion and rocker Ted Nugent expressed outrage at the shootings outside New York’s iconic Empire State Building on Friday, but pointed to the tragedy as a failure of gun control.
“The Empire State shooting is yet another gun free zone,” declared Nugent on Friday. “How’s that working NYC? Chicago? Philly? Newark? DC? Rwanda? Sudan? Syria? Mexico?”
Jeffrey Johnson, said to be a disgruntled laid-off women's accessories designer shot a former co-worker to death in front of the Empire State Building, causing a chaotic showdown with police in front of one of the world's best-known landmarks.
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Police then killed 53-year-old Johnson but at least nine others were wounded, some possibly by police gunfire, city officials said.
A member of the NRA’s board of directors, Nugent is a passionate supporter of the Second Amendment freedom to bear arms and he unceremoniously dismisses recent calls for gun control based on what he considers to be an uninformed reaction to earlier mass-shooting tragedies in Aurora, Colo., and Oak Creek, Wis.
“Everybody dead in Aurora was unarmed and helpless. Everybody dead in Milwaukee was unarmed and helpless. Everyone dead at Virginia Tech was unarmed and helpless,” Nugent told Newsmax in an earlier interview this month. “How dare the president or Nancy Pelosi, or Bloomberg want more of that?”
In the wake of the Aurora shootings, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called on the presidential candidates to come up with a specific plan on gun control. Bloomberg heads up a coalition of American mayors who support tighter gun control. The group has lobbied for stronger enforcement of existing laws.
Bloomberg said at that time that it was incumbent on President Barack Obama and GOP challenger Mitt Romney to address the issue "specifically — not in just broad terms."
Nugent counters that gun control is “literally opening the door as wide as possible for evil to do to unarmed and helpless victims what they want.”
A Newsmax contributor, the platinum-selling recording artist also insisted there are hard statistics to back up his position.
“Where there are more concealed weapons permits, oftentimes — more often than not — rape doesn’t go down, it disappears,” he said. “How do you not embrace that? How do you not see how lives are saved? I can name you instance after instance where armed people stopped evil and saved lives.”
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