Gun policy was noticeably absent from the opening contest between Republican presidential candidates.
On Wednesday night, the issue was not brought up independently by any candidates. And almost nobody addressed gun policy directly in any of their answers. Fox News host Bret Baier tried to broach the subject by asking the candidates what they would do about guns and gun violence.
“This weekend here in Milwaukee, reports say there were 30 shootings, and a number of them including kids. Add that to the big increase in school shootings around the country,” Baier said while setting up a question to former New Jersey Governor Chirs Christie. “Democrats blame this crisis on easy access to guns. They also blame Republicans for blocking gun control legislation.”
Christie said he would instruct federal prosecutors to take over the prosecution of violent crime in cities.
“We have plenty of room in the federal prisons to lock up these violent criminals and clean up what’s going on all across this country in these individual cities,” he said.
In the only moment where gun policy was mentioned throughout the night, he then pivoted to criticizing the ongoing prosecution of President Joe Biden’s son for gun possession charges. He accused the elder Biden of hypocrisy and vowed to lock up his son if elected. However, he also inaccurately characterized the potential maximum sentence for the crime Hunter Biden has been accused of as a mandatory minimum.
“When Hunter Biden fills out a fake application, a false application for a gun permit, and then is facing a ten-year mandatory minimum, which was mandated by legislation sponsored by his father, and then you have a Justice Department that walks away from those charges we’re telling people the law doesn’t apply to everybody,” Christie said. “In a Christie Administration, he would go to jail for ten years.”
When asked by Baier what he would do about guns, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy didn’t mention gun policy and instead said he would deploy more police and bring back mental institutions to address crime.
“The problem in our country right now, the reason we have that mental health epidemic, is that people are so hungry for purpose and meaning,” he said. “At a time when family, faith, patriotism, and hard work have all disappeared, what we really need is a tonal reset from the top saying this is what it means to be American.”
The responses about guns and crime were sidetracked somewhat when former Vice President Mike Pence and Ramaswamy got into a debate over whether America was in an identity crisis. Pence argued the country isn’t “looking for a new national identity” because “the American people are the most faith-filled, freedom-loving, idealistic people the world has ever known,” while Ramaswamy countered that “we live in a dark moment” and “we’re in an internal sort of cold cultural civil war.” When Baier pivoted back to the question at hand, he dropped the gun policy aspect and asked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who instituted pro-gun reforms in his state during the lead-up to his campaign, only about crime generally.
He responded by saying “hollowed out cities” are the result of “George Soros funding these radical left-wing district attorneys” who “get into office and say they aren’t going to prosecute crimes they don’t agree with.” He pointed to his removal of two district attorneys as an example of how he would address crime if elected. But he didn’t reference any of the gun policies he instituted while governor.
North Dakota Governor Doug Bergum argued crime should be addressed by turning to “small-town values.” Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson finished out the segment by saying primary frontrunner and former President Donald Trump has undermined the justice system by attacking law enforcement officials and concluded, “we have to have respect for our justice system and our rule of law, and it starts at the top.”
Trump, who skipped the debate and sat down for an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, didn’t address gun policy in the 46-minute conversation that was posted to Twitter during the debate.
4 Responses
But had there been a direct question regarding support for gun control, would we have learned anything from all eight responses in the negative? There might have been one or two slightly nuanced answers supporting minor edits to current policy, but I think it would be much more likely that someone would come out full steam against this administration’s policies and actions of the ATF. Besides, it’s not like one of the moderators was Geraldo Rivera…
They were asked about how they would handle gun policy as president, and nobody really answered the question one way or another. I wouldn’t expect any of them to be particularly supportive of any gun-control policy. But I would imagine Republican primary voters want to know how they view the issue and what pro-gun policies they support as well. I’m pretty surprised nobody tried to show off their pro-gun bonafides, especially DeSantis since that was clearly something he prioritized in the leadup to his run.
“Hollowed out”, not “hallowed”, right? Also, I think there’s a typo in paragraph 8 before the Vivek quote. This is the effect of too much baseball, sir. 😀
I think DeSantis was on the right track shifting the framing of the question about rising crime. The issues touching on “gun policy” really need this treatment times ten. So many (republican) candidates in the debate setting have a tendency to react to moderator narratives rather than reframing narratives and checking assumptions. I’m waiting to hear a candidate say a kid is more likely to suffer sexual abuse in the school system than “gun violence”. That will blow some minds. But Ramaswamy is right to bring up the cultural sickness in this country in the context of guns and crime. I was surprised by the tone-deafness of Pence’s take on this. IF having weapons of war in the hands of civilians is the point of 2A, and IF you think society is too irresponsible to handle this anymore, you can work towards a new reality by adjusting either side of that equation. Ramaswamy is on point that there are greater returns in fixing culture than there are from nerfing up the physical world.
So I guess I appreciated that the gun issues can take a wider view than the ol’ banning/not banning debate.
Good catch! Thanks for the heads up. I’ve fixed the typos.
To be fair to DeSantis, he was only specifically asked about crime. So, he wasn’t really directly asked about gun policy at all. The answers on what to do about crime are somewhat related to what gun policy should be, though. They all had pretty similar views on that front that are pretty typical for Republicans writ large (basically more cops and tougher prosecutors).