Fox anchor: You can’t legislate guns, but maybe you can regulate video games
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
From the February 16 edition of Fox News' Happening Now:
JON SCOTT (CO-HOST): As long as human beings are around, Jamie, you're going to have evil. Drugs are illegal in this country and we've got -- we're awash in illegal drugs. How do you legislate something like guns?
JAMIE WEINSTEIN: Even if you didn't have the Second Amendment -- let's say we didn't have the Second Amendment and there was a national consensus to ban all guns. As you mentioned, there's already as many guns as there are people in the United States. You can ban certain types of guns, and they still exist on the market or on the black market for people to get who want to commit evil like this. Now, you can put up barriers and that's a good thing. But at the end of the day, even these type of gun violence episodes with rifles or assault weapons, as some people term them, they're only a small part of the overall gun violence deaths per year. Three percent of murders are committed with rifles, which are termed assault weapons, depending on which ones you choose. Most are them are done by handguns and that's not even being addressed with many of these solutions. So this is a very difficult problem. I'm all for coming up with ways to try to solve it to the extent that we can, but I don't think we're going to solve gun violence more broadly because it's -- there are evil people out there and they're going to try to do evil, commit evil, and I don't know if we can make all that go away.
SCOTT: How about video games, Ethan? Would you support regulating video games? There are video games out there that are very realistic and you can shoot to death every video character on the screen and leave them lying in a pool of blood.
ETHAN BEARMAN: Well I think that's a much more challenging issue because that gets into parenting and greater social issues.
SCOTT: Why?
BEARMAN: Because how do you regulate video games? Whereas a handgun, you can control the flow of them. Germany did it very successfully after a series of school shootings in Germany.
Previously:
Right-wing media figures are blaming everything but guns for the Parkland shooting