10-04-2017, 10:04 AM
I had the pleasure of hearing Mark Kelly speak last night. I wanted to share some of his words on all of this. This is from an article in my local paper, which is behind a paywall. http://www.dnronline.com/news/local/astronaut-says-america-has-problem-with-guns/article_f5643194-a8b2-11e7-8efc-e77bfbd5e122.html
Quote:BRIDGEWATER — Mark Kelly knows guns. He owns them and has been in combat, fighting for his country.
But he thinks America has a problem, and it must take steps to restrict who can buy guns legally and how some weapons operate.
“We have 33,000 people on average die from gun violence every single year,” the retired astronaut, engineer and Navy captain said Tuesday afternoon, before a speaking engagement at Bridgewater College and just days after a gunman killed and wounded scores of people in Las Vegas. “It’s an enormous amount of people. It’s a huge cost to our country.
“The sad thing is it does not have to be that bad, and our laws do matter. So if we can prevent the wrong people from getting their hands on guns through things like background checks and making sure we have records that are complete and we know who the domestic abusers are who are out there, we can prevent some of these things, not all of them.”
Kelly is not just a gun owner and user. He’s a victim of gun violence.
His wife, former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in which six people were killed and 13 wounded.
He told the packed crowd at Cole Hall Tuesday night that he was flying his mother and two daughters from Houston to Arizona on a private plane when CNN, MSNBC and Fox News all announced that she’d died. Thirty minutes later, they corrected their story to say she was in surgery.
“The media shouldn’t be pronouncing people dead,” Kelly said. “Probably should leave that up to doctors. And I can tell you this, my wife Gabby was not going to be taken out by cable news.”
Kelly said Tuesday that he’d spoken to Chuck Todd of NBC News that day about Sunday night’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, in which a gunman in the upper floors of a hotel sprayed round after round into a crowd of more than 20,000 concertgoers. At least 59 people were killed and more than 500 injured.
The 53-year-old said the killer “was able to amass a pretty unique set of weapons that could fire automatically, for some reason,” and that he had a tactical advantage over his targets.
Kelly is concerned about a bill to make it easier for people to purchase gun silencers that’s making its way through Congress. The shooting, it was reported Tuesday, likely has sidelined the legislation at least temporarily.
“Then we think about what if that guy had a silencer on that weapon?” Kelly asked. “That’s what really worries me.
“Congress right now is in the process of considering legalizing silencers, where he could have gone out, bought a silencer and put it on that weapon. What would that look like if these people couldn’t hear the gunshots being fired?”
Solutions Available
Identifying the problem is one thing. Solving it is another.
Kelly said he doesn’t want to take guns away from Americans. The 25-year military veteran said responsible people have a right to own guns to defend themselves, hunt and target shoot.
“We don’t need,” he said, “to infringe on responsible people’s rights.”
But he said convicted felons shouldn’t be able to buy guns, as they can now in places where background checks aren’t required.
Domestic abusers, he said, shouldn’t be able to buy guns because a number have become mass shooters. Guns also should be kept out of the hands of stalkers, he added.
Safe-storage laws should be put into place, he said, and steps need to be taken to keep guns from being trafficked from states with looser laws to states with tougher laws.
Kelly also opined that the types of weapons available should be restricted from current levels.
“Should any individuals have the right to arm themselves in the same way as SEAL Team Six? Probably not,” he said. “We should have a conversation about what firearms should be in the hands of what kinds of individuals, and maybe for certain things we decide to have a higher standard.
“But I think the ability for somebody to go out and buy an AR-15 or an AK-47 and modify it, potentially legally, to get it to fire as a fully automatic weapon is probably not a good idea, and it certainly probably contributed to what we saw in Vegas this week.”
Steps such as those Kelly outlined won’t bring an end to gun violence and deaths, he said, but they will reduce the number of people killed or wounded, and 80 percent or more of American support tougher gun laws.
“We know that in the states that have the stronger gun laws,” he said, “we have less people that die from gun violence, so we can make this better. ... If we do these things, I can guarantee you that the number of people that die in this country will go down. If we don’t, it has been trending in the wrong direction.”
Giffords, Kelly told the crowd Tuesday night, could not be in Bridgewater due to another commitment, and she no longer can do many things that were routine before the shooting.
But he said she keeps the piece of skull removed during her first surgery in a container in the freezer of their Tucson, Ariz., home and delights in taking it out and showing it to first-time guests there.
“Despite putting a bullet through her head,” Kelly said of the would-be assassin, “he hasn’t put a dent in her spirit and in her desire to make the world a better place.”
