In the wake of a mass shooting in Las Vegas, many Americans are calling for stricter gun laws that would ban assault weapons.
“I think we’re all wondering: where do we draw the line?” said news analyst Charlie Sennott on BPR today. “We love our constitution; it’s a really great document, but did they really mean when they said, ‘You have the right to bear arms’ — that you have the right to bear an assault rifle, that you can use as an automatic weapon to gun people down?”
Sennott said that people in other countries “think our gun laws are absolutely crazy.”
“This is one of the things the world just doesn’t understand: it’s almost like this obsession with guns in America,” he said. “I think it’s worth us always reflecting on. We can use the world as a mirror for capital punishment, for weapons, and how we think about guns and our relationship to them, but we are our own country. We’ve got to make our own decisions.”
Sennott said he can sense restlessness among American citizens who have repeatedly called for an assault weapons ban after other mass shootings, including in Newtown, Connecticut and Orlando, Florida.
“How many times do we have to have a president, in this case, tweet, ‘Thoughts and prayers are with you’? I can sense that there’s real frustration with that,” he said. “Thoughts and prayers — What about action? When are we going to really do something about this?”
Charlie Sennott is a news analyst at WGBH where he also heads up the GroundTruth Project. To hear his interview in its entirety, click on the audio player above.
