Shawn Griffithshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJM8DyjsBU4
It is hard to believe that Karl Rove would openly say something like this, given his history as a pro-gun advocate, but on Fox News Sunday the Republican consultant told Chris Wallace that the only way to fully prevent tragedies like the shooting at Emmanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, was to "remove guns from society" completely.
When Wallace asked Rove to comment on how society could stop violence, here is his response:
I wish I had an easy answer for that, but I don’t think there’s an easy answerWe saw an act of evil. Racist, bigoted evil, and to me the amazing thing is that it was met with grief and love. Think about how far we’ve come since 1963. The whole weight of the government throughout the South was to impede finding and holding and bringing to justice the men who perpetrated the [Birmingham] bombing. And here, we saw an entire state, an entire community, an entire nation come together, grieving as one and united in the belief that this was an evil act, so we’ve come a long way. Now maybe there’s some magic law that will keep us from having more of these. I mean basically the only way to guarantee that we will dramatically reduce acts of violence involving guns is to basically remove guns from society, and until somebody gets enough “oomph” to repeal the Second Amendment, that’s not going to happen. - Karl Rove, 6/21/2015
However, for some who reported on the story, that's where the interview stopped. Rove added that he doesn't think repealing the Second Amendment is the answer. He believes, in the case of Charleston, there were plenty of warning signs that people close to the shooter failed to speak out about.
Rove said the shooter's parents didn't pay attention and his community had given up on him. He said the shooter was "a loner who had fallen into the clutches of racist organizations and had come to believe in their ideology." He reiterated that the warning signs were there and he wished someone would have said something before the tragedy in Charleston occurred.
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