Fox News guest Buck Sexton said Tuesday on Tucker Carlson Tonight that those who criticize politicians who can but won’t enact legislation to help prevent mass shootings like the one at a Texas elementary school earlier in the day are “hurting the situation.”
Host Tucker Carlson hypothesized that mental illness could have played a part in the shooting. Many on the left, he claimed, “don’t seem that interested in the fact that there are an awful lot of tragically, sometimes dangerously mentally ill people wandering around all of a sudden.” He then asked, “Am I the only one to notice this?”
Sexton said a discussion about mental illness “would be a helpful conversation for the country to have, and obviously in this moment of real tragedy, there is a need for unity and healing in the country as much as we can to try to achieve something in the aftermath of evil like this.”
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But Sexton then criticized those like Sen. Chis Murphy (D-CT) and President Joe Biden for calling for action to stop mass shootings, and mocked the effectiveness of any bill that Congress could pass if it could someday overcome stubborn Republican resistance backed by the gun lobby.
“But I have to say, the people that are using this as an opportunity to bludgeon the other side with platitudes about ‘we must do something’—that always falls into a very narrow political lens. They are actually hurting the situation,” Sexton asserted.
“They are actually making this more difficult,” he continued, “because if we are really trying to have a conversation about how to stop this kind of atrocity from happening again—and it’s by the percentages [in that] you’re not going to stop all mass shootings, [but] you want to stop as many as you humanly possibly could without completely imploding your society in the process.”
That conversation, he argued, “can’t be along the lines of, ‘Here’s the thing that I have been trying to pass in Congress for the last six months or the last 20 years that no one thinks will actually do anything about the shooting or other shootings and if you don’t do that, you are a monster.’”
Carlson agreed. “When someone dies, you pause and observe a moment of silence, because it is not about you,” he said. “You don’t immediately start talking about yourself, you narcissist. ‘Well, I have a law that I could pass.’ No, stop.”
Sexton later reiterated that a dialogue on mental illness is “obviously” worth having. However, “pushing magazine limitations or whatever the issue may be in the moment just goes to show that there are some people who cannot get beyond themselves even at a moment of national tragedy like this.”
