Dana Loesch, host on TheBlaze TV, while on a show with Martha MacCallum on Fox News, debated with gun control advocate Mark Glaze following the horrific shooting on Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice in Virginia.
“First and foremost,” Loesch began, “obviously our prayers are with Congressman Scalise and those individuals who were wounded in this attempted political assassination. And bravo to the Capitol Hill Police who as you heard other congressional members say, if Representative Scalise had not been on that field, with those two officers who are afforded to him as a perk of being a member of leadership there in the Republican Party in the house, they would have been sitting ducks. All they would have had was their gloves and their baseball bats with which to defend themselves which seems, it’s amazing to me.”
“This isn’t a gun issue,” Loesch declared. “The good guys saved the day. Guns save lives. That’s what the story proved.”
“But furthermore, this isn’t an issue, Martha, about firearms,” she continued. “This is an issue about rhetoric. Martha, this is an issue about a guy who has been feeding off the poison that has been coming from comedians and Shakespeare plays of assassinating presidents that are playing in the park.”
“This has been coming from vitriolic rhetoric from the DNC chair,” she added, “and the California Democrat Party who say ‘blank the Republicans, they don’t care about you.’ And individuals like this feed off of this poison, and what’s the result? The result is that these four individuals, their lives were, five individuals now, they were affected by this, and we could have lost a loyal public servant, a husband and father.”
“Well you know politics may have had something to do with what happened today,” Glaze admitted. “But for context, in San Francisco today, four people were killed in a U.S. postal service facility, or a UPS facility, tomorrow, 93 more Americans are going to be killed with guns, and the next day, and the next day.”
“And by the way,” he continued, “the way people in the United Kingdom do politics makes it look like patty cake here in America, but we have 25 times the gun murder rate of people in every other Western country and the reason is, we will give guns to just about anybody. We have to address that.”
MacCallum then indicated that Virginia has quite relaxed gun laws. She asked Loesch why she thought that was a strong argument to explain gun violence.
“No, no,” Loesch responded, “I would obviously have to disagree with the statements. And first off, I think it’s kinda silly to compare us to the U.K., specifically because they also classify crimes differently, and we could get into the weeds all day on that, and I welcome any, all and all debate on that, and I’ll be there anytime anywhere.”
“But with that point, what happened in San Francisco is also awful,” she continued, “but I want to point out that the CDC report commissioned by former President Obama in 2013 just proved what we all knew: it’s that defensive gun use by law-abiding Americans, Martha, greatly outweighs criminal abuses. I definitely don’t want anybody to be made a sitting duck just because the only argument is that a criminal may abuse something that they have every right to possess. Guns save lives, and guns saved the lives in Alexandria, Virginia.”
Glaze counter-argued with more facts and figures about gun violence in America. “Last year and just about every year in America,” he said, “we have some where around 32,000 gun murders and we have about 214 justifiable homicides. Everybody sort of knows that there’s a public health epidemic around guns, and you know we through out this claim that self-defense is a significant factor in America, it’s just not.”
“What’s the number for how many people’s lives are saved by someone who steps in with a gun?” MacCallum interrupted.
“Well, we don’t know,” Glaze responded, “part of the reason is that the NRA won’t let us do the research.”
“We do! That’s a lie!” Loesch interjected. “That’s an absolute lie. [The] CDC report commissioned in 2013 proved it was anywhere from 2.1, actually 500,000 to 2.3 million instances annually, so don’t lie and say that the NRA stood in the way of that. It disrupts your narrative, and you refuse to acknowledge it, and at the same time you’ve had the audacity to claim that you’re for gun safety.”
Commissioned by the Obama administration, the CDC report released in 2013, determined that self-defense “can be an important crime deterrent.”
