Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said the shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner could be a moment of unity that brought universal background checks for gun ownership.
Raskin said, “I’d just been there for a few moments. I had not even gotten to the table where I was going to be, table 36 with the people from NBC. The people at the Boston Globe table saw me, got up. They wanted to greet me and say hello, and they said, you’re all fine. Kerry Kennedy is here. We go back to law school in the 20th century, you know, and so Kerry came over, we were talking.”
He continued, “Suddenly, there are loud booms, crashing sounds, plates, silverware, everything flying all over the place. And people started yelling, get down, get down! Somebody kind of grabbed me and pushed me from behind. I landed on Kerry, and a couple of other people, and then, you know, people were panicked. And, you know, I thought immediately about Kerry’s situation, having lost her father, in the gun violence, assassination, and her uncle, and we were down on the ground for about 2 or 3 minutes before people were saying it’s safe to get back up. They got him. We got up. And the first thing Kerry said to me was, “This is happening in schools across the country.” And, the kids have no resources to process their trauma. And so she was talking about gun violence and thinking about other people. And, she’s a great human rights activist. And, you know, nobody wants to be in a situation like that, but I was glad to have been with her.”
Host Dana Bash said, ‘Yeah. I mean, it’s the first thing that you thought of. You thought about the trauma, obviously, that she had when she was, you know, a baby or she certainly has known about because it’s not only American history, it’s obviously how she lost her father.”
Raskin said, “But but we’ve not dealt with the problem. I mean, we’re losing, you know, thousands of people a year to gun violence. There are 100 people shot every day. So yesterday, while that nightmare was going on at the White House Correspondents’ ball, dozens of people had been shot across the country. And we just accept that as the normal course of business. So you know, I think before we get back to all the political divisions and fighting about stuff, maybe this could be a moment of unity for trying to focus on the things that the vast majority of the American people want, like a universal, violent criminal background check.”
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