It was a new year, but the same lament from MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry. The leftist agenda to curtail gun rights has been frustrated. On Saturday morning, the weekend host and weekday professor treated guns (not people) as the killers as she pleaded for young blacks to have a “separate kind of legal construction to address the violence that they might perpetrate in the world because they're living under this kind of mental constant threat and belief of death. Not even primarily at the hands of police, but at the hands of guns generally.”
Guns don’t have hands. People have hands. From there, as Derek Draplin reported at the Daily Caller, Harris-Perry tried to explain to fellow professor Jon Shane that confiscating "perfectly legal" guns would mean less husbands shooting their wives:
MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY: It seems to me that part of what happened in each of these cases is — and the question of fear — is it in part because we live in a country where really anybody at any moment might, in fact, have a gun. Again, I keep thinking about Quintonio’s father in Chicago calling for help for his son, calling the police, and his son ends up shot and killed by the police. Now I don’t know exactly what happened, we will be learning more. But I presume some part of it is that these police officers think that this kid might be armed because we think everybody might be armed. Shouldn’t officers be the number one folks behind gun control?
JON SHANE: Well, you do have a lot of Second Amendment officers. I happen to favor carrying a gun myself. I don’t think there’s much wrong with it. The reality is how are we going to keep the illegal guns away from people? It’s a very easy thing to do to keep guns...
HARRIS-PERRY: A lot of people shoot their wives with perfectly legal guns.
SHANE: And?
HARRIS-PERRY: So they wouldn’t if they did not have them. So. So, so --
SHANE: But we’re not going to take guns away from people. We’re just going to make it harder for law-abiding citizens to get them.
At this point, Harris-Perry let Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker deride that argument as false, and then quickly went to commercial. The idea of giving more time to a gun-rights argument just wasn't acceptable.
