We have all come to expect some of the most ridiculous statements to flow across the airwaves of Fox News, but what one of their hosts said Sunday about guns and freedom may just rocket to #1 on the hit parade of stupid in record time.
The intellectual lightweights on Fox & Friends asserted that mass shootings such as the one last week in Oregon could be prevented by eliminating “gun free zones” instead of passing the type of gun safety laws that have worked extremely well in Australia. Co-host Tucker Carlson said Donald Trump should be praised for his comments in which he said the Umpqua Community College shooting was a result of campus gun bans:
“When there’s a drunk driving accident, you don’t ban cars, you try to prevent drunk people from driving them. The idea that taking guns away from the law-abiding will make us safer is insane and childish.”
And Carlson should know about insane and childish in light of the fact that he is on a first-name basis with both.
Then another of the hosts, Anna Kooiman, chimed in and argued that “the number of guns in American households has actually gone down” as the number of mass shootings increase, so guns could not be at fault.
Where she got her stats from would be interesting to examine, but then again, why should we expect facts from Fox News? They’ve never relied on them and don’t intend to start now.
Clayton Morris, another of the less-than-fully-informed hosts then remarked:
“The other side of the that argument, of course, is — and what people always throw out there — is look at Australia. They have no gun violence, they don’t have guns, citizens aren’t allowed to have guns.”
This prompted Carlson to declare:
“They also have no freedom! You can go to prison for expressing unpopular views and people do. And in Western Europe by the way. And in Canada. No one ever says that.”
So there’s no freedom in Australia and Western Europe, Tucker? Something tells me that would be news to the people who live there. And just the fact that he is equating owning guns with the right to express unpopular views is beyond ludicrous. But hey, it’s Fox News, where the news not only comes last in the title, but also in the content.
