Congressman David Price, a Democrat from North Carolina and a vice chair on the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, said the NRA must be willing to adapt if there is to be any meaningful progress on gun control. “Of course we need political leadership, including political leadership from perhaps unexpected quarters to encourage us to come together on this,” Price said on Wednesday’s PoliticsNation. “It is going to require the NRA and other organizations to be part of the solution, not to just dig in with resistance,” he said. “The NRA, I’m afraid, engages in some fear-mongering, seeing every measure as a slippery-slope towards confiscating guns,” Price said. “It’s absolutely not true and they know it’s not true.”
“I believe that reasonable measures can be agreed upon by reasonable people…We’re not talking about the ability to own guns for self-protection or for sporting purposes, but we are talking about keeping those guns out of the wrong hands.”
Price also pointed to a certain “category” of guns that “have no purpose except to mow people down. “The hunters I know, they scoff at that, that anybody needs that kind of weapon.”
Price conceded that some of his Congressional colleagues don’t seem open to compromise. “I have to say that Congress is more polarized and more stuck on talking points than I’ve ever seen it in my time there,” he said. In Price’s view, improving databases of criminals or closing the gun show loophole for background checks shouldn’t be “a divisive proposition.”
“I think there’s a good chance that we can push a positive agenda forward,” Price said. “We just need to search our hearts and our souls and ask if there’s not more we can do as a nation to prevent this sort of thing.”
“If this Newtown tragedy doesn’t do it, I’m not sure what will.”
Morgan Whitaker