Speaker 1: Let's now look at another example from Fox News from over the weekend, Senator
Dick Durbin, a Democrat, appeared on Fox News and he represents Illinois. So he was understandably
asked about this horrific mass shooting in Highland Park. Highland Park is a swanky suburb of
Chicago. It is not Chicago. And the the host much like with people to judge same host by the way,
tries these tired, repetitive talking points and says, hey, if it's all about gun laws,
Chicago has really strict gun laws. Why was there a shooting in Chicago if there
are strict gun laws? And of course, the shooting wasn't in Chicago. And Dick Durbin visibly just
exhausted by this tired line of questioning. Speaker 4: Highland Park before this is over.
To be fair, though, if it were just about gun laws, wouldn't Chicago, with some of
the toughest gun laws in the country, be a safer city? Let me tell you something quickly. Highland
Park is not Chicago. It's a suburb of Chicago, a small town, a great small town. It's the first
place you would have chosen to go to a 4th of July parade with your son, a grandson or granddaughter.
It's a it's a wonderful community. And to say, oh, Chicago is so dangerous. Yes, it's dangerous,
but so is Saint Louis. And so towns Jackson, Mississippi and others have a murder rate as well.
And so the fact that we've proliferated so many guns, the police that I sit down with privately
on a regular basis say, Senator, you just don't have any idea how many guns are out there.
And there are so easily accessible. The gun industry has made a lot of money out of this,
but America is not safer because of it. Speaker 1: And so listen.
Speaker 4: Let me be clear. I want to express my heartfelt condolences
to the people of Highland Park, right? Speaker 1: Yes. Rather than just attacking
everything we do feel bad for the victims of the fox host gets on the record there. So there's like
three different things here. Okay. First of all, Highland Park is not Chicago. Dick Durbin doing a
good job of pointing that out and the idea that, oh, it's urban it's urban gun violence. Highland
Park is like a swanky it's your prototypical wealthy suburb of sorts. And there's lots of,
you know, the suburb in a sense, originated in the suburban Chicago area. And it's your prototypical
suburb. It was not in Chicago. It was close, though. Second layer, this whole thing of the
dangerous cities run by Democrats. Democrats are more likely to live in cities than Republicans.
And so cities tend to be run by Democrats. Safe cities and unsafe cities. In addition,
there are lots of cities, lots. There are, you know, ten notable cities run by Republicans
that are not particularly safe cities, and they never want to talk about that. But the
third layer that I want to mention again is from Chicago, from dangerous Chicago to Gary, Indiana,
where the gun laws are much more relaxed. It's a 40 minute drive. There's even public transit
as terrible as public transit is in this country. You can get on a bus and go from Chicago to Gary
in under an hour. So does it really matter that in Chicago there are on paper strict gun laws where
you can just go 40 minutes and get your guns in Indiana? Case in point, Highland Park, Illinois.
There's a place in Hammond, Indiana, called Deb's Gun Range. Okay. Deb's gun range is a big, big gun
shop. It's an 80 minute drive from Highland Park, Illinois, to Debs gun range in Hammond, Indiana,
where you can get your guns. Do Chicago area gun laws really matter when in nearby Indiana,
people sell their weapons to other people without background checks or paperwork, even recording the
sale. This is such tired, old nonsense. And Dick Durbin, he got a piece of it right. And of course,
they throw it in. In the last minute they go, we got to run. But listen, if the gun laws mattered,
then why did this happen in Chicago? Well, it wasn't Chicago and Indiana's 35 minutes away
and on and on and on. And it does not matter, because these are the talking points that the
Fox News audience wants to see. They want to see and hear this pablum to make them feel good
about doing nothing about guns. That's the whole point of all of this. And we should be sick of
it. I'm sick of it. We should have change. And the only hope here is that this decided
effort from the right to do nothing about guns does seem to be shifting the balance of how people
plan to vote in November against Republicans. The Roe v Wade decision seems to be part of it.
Doing nothing about gun safety seems to be part of it. Let's see what happens in November.