Putting guns in the hands of school personnel and dealing with mental health issues are more important than stricter gun controls in preventing mass shootings, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tells Newsmax TV.
According to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, two out of every five guns in the U.S. changes hands without a background check. Asked if more needs to be done to track private gun sales, Gingrich responds: “First of all I’m always intrigued that if you harass and regulate the innocent you’ll somehow inconvenience the criminal.
“How many people think that a real criminal is going to worry about going to buy a legal gun with a legal background check from a legal dealer? When you look at Chicago, which has very strict gun control laws – and this is why I’m trying to get the House Republicans to hold hearings in Chicago — Chicago has the worst murder rate in the country. Over 500 people died last year in Chicago. There was no effort on the left to talk about it because they’re embarrassed by it. It’s the president’s home city. The mayor is the president’s former chief of staff. Nobody wanted to go and touch it.
“And ask yourself this question: Over 70,000 felons have attempted to buy a gun and almost none of them have been prosecuted. So if we’re not enforcing the laws, why do we want to rush out and harass the innocent even more, and if somebody wants to sell his nephew a gun, why does that have to be a federally monitorable event inside a family?
“The two things we should put on the table are guards in schools, or training school personnel to be able to have concealed carry in an orderly way, and, second, looking at the psychiatric records of mass killers.
“It’s perfectly reasonable to hold hearings, and let’s look at what is the psychology of mass killers. How many of them were already on various kinds of psychiatric drugs?”
He concludes: “What if we were talking about violence control instead of gun control?”
See the full excerpt of the interview below:
Editor’s Note: Click Here to See the Full Newsmax Interview With Newt Gingrich.