It has been clear for a while now that CNN’s Brooke Baldwin is an advocate for stricter gun control laws. It is still useful, however, to hear her come right out and say it.
Baldwin interviewed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand this week about the latter’s 2020 Democratic primary candidacy. The two spoke at length about the senator’s platform, including the New York lawmaker’s gun control proposals. The CNN host began first by asking Gillibrand whether she is still hopeful that something will get done in Congress even after President Trump backed away this week from his earlier support for expanding background checks.
The senator responded with some predictable lines about how the president lacks the courage to stand up to the National Rifle Association, with whom Gillibrand herself used to have a cordial, chummy relationship.
“Universal background checks, making sure we ban assault weapons and large magazines, and a federal, anti-gun trafficking law,” replied the senator. “We shouldn’t have to live in a world where kids doing back-to-school shopping at Walmart are afraid, where kids are doing shelter-in-place drills as opposed to mathematical drills. It’s not what we should be aspiring to.”
This is where Baldwin endorsed Gililbrand’s gun control proposals.
“How can President Trump get it? You get it,” interjected the CNN host. “How can President Trump get it? How can Senator Mitch McConnell get it?”
Well, okay then.
“I think people need to keep raising their voices,” Gillibrand responded. “We have mental health issues in every country around the globe, but only in America do you have these mass shootings, do you have gun violence on every street corner in big cities.”
In case you mistake this as a one-off for Baldwin, the Washington Free Beacon reminds its readers that she has made her position on the issue of gun control pretty clear recently.
“An emotional Baldwin rebuked Congress and the White House for what she viewed as lack of proper action in response to the shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, earlier this month,” it reported this week.
The report adds, “Baldwin also grew angry with a Florida Republican in 2018, shortly after the Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, for his resistance to discussing a ban on semiautomatic guns. He responded it would be a ban on nearly all guns, and at one point she demanded he stop returning to his ‘talking points.’”
