CNN announced on Monday their network will be hosting another town hall on firearms in the aftermath of two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Between the two attacks, more then 30 people were killed in less than a 24-hour period.
Titled America Under Assault: The Gun Crisis, the live town hall will be hosted by CNN anchor Chris Cuomo from 9-10 p.m. EST on Wednesday.
CNN to host a @CuomoPrimeTime town hall, AMERICA UNDER ASSAULT: The Gun Crisis on Wed., Aug. 7 from 9-10pm ET led by @ChrisCuomo.
— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) August 5, 2019
This town hall will be the second the network has hosted after mass shootings, with the first one being hosted a week after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen students and faculty were killed in that attack.
The 2018 town hall was criticized for taking place very shortly after the incident and for the network appearing to take sides.
To critics, the most damning part was giving former Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel a platform to deflect from his yet-unknown department’s failings in preventing the shootings to focus anger on nationally syndicated radio host Dana Loesch, who was a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association at the time.
“Given how disastrous the last one was for civil discourse on the issue I have zero expectation that this one will be any better,” Loesch told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a difficult thing to ask viewers to suspend their reality and accept Cuomo, who has been quite partisan on the issue, as a sudden neutral moderator. Right off the bat it doesn’t seem like a good-faith gesture of objectivity.”
The town hall was given a Walter Cronkite award in 2019 for best “National Network News Program” for helping to “advance the national conversation on gun control and violence.”
