During an appearance on MSNBC this morning, Congressman Charlie Rangel was asked what he thought about the assault weapons ban being dropped from Senate bill.
Rangel blamed the defeat on politics and money and then made the extraordinary claim that "millions of kids" are dying because they are "being shot down by assault weapons."
I’m ashamed to admit it but its politics and its money, The NRA has taken this position, there is no reason, there is no foundation. There is no hunter that needs automatic military weapons to enjoy the culture of going hunting.
But you know it’s really basically the absence of the voices of good people. I cannot believe that politicians are afraid of the NRA, if they thought for one minute that the churches and the synagogue and the priest and the ministers were saying "Hey! Do the right thing and we have your back.”
We're talking about millions of kids dying — being shot down by assault weapons, were talking about handguns easier in the inner cities, to get these guns in the inner cities, than to get computers. This is not just a political issue, it’s a moral issue and so when we condemn the NRA we should not ignore the fact that a lot of people that have taken moral positions have been solid on this big one.
FBI data from 2010 shows a vast majority of gun murders in the U.S. are committed with a handgun and you're more likely to be killed with someone’s “hands/feet/fists” than a rifle. Furthermore, the total number of gun/firearm homicides in 2011 was just 8,583.
