CNN Anchor Soledad OBrien Clashes With Republican Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack on Gun Control After Newtown Connecticut School Shooting

CNN

CNN’s Soledad O’Brien on Saturday had a fiery gun control debate with Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) following the Connecticut elementary school massacre, charging that unless something is done, the two of them will be having “this exact same conversation at the next terrible tragedy.”

“There’s always a tragedy, we all run out and we cover it and people watch at home and they’re brokenhearted and then we all go on the next day or three weeks later as if, ‘Well, you know that’s done,’” O’Brien leveled. “I guarantee you the next school shooting we’ll be talking about gun control again and I would put money on it that between now and that next shooting, no one’s going to do anything…what has to change so people can’t get access to semi-automatic weapons and go into a school and shoot up a bunch of kids?”

Bono Mack said very little is known yet about the shooter and “we’re making a lot of assumptions that we really shouldn’t make yet.”

“We know the weapons he used,” O’Brien responded. “He had three weapons at least on him…he shot and killed people. He shot them, he didn’t stab them, he didn’t do a pipe bomb, he shot them. And I think this conversation at some point has to go back to, what is the normal amount of guns that people can own and how they’re registered and how they’re tracked, otherwise you and I will have this exact same conversation at the next terrible tragedy, we will and I think you know we will, right?

Bono Mack, who lost her re-election bid in November, said she prays that won’t be the case, but again cautioned that there are still many unanswered questions, including whether the shooter was using drugs or had sought mental health counseling.

“This guy seriously snapped. And the guns didn’t make him snap, he snapped and then sought out the guns,” Bono Mack said. “Whether they were his mother’s guns or whether they were somebody else’s, he was going to snap and do something horrific and heinous, unfortunately.”

“But we know he used guns and that’s how he killed 26 people, and then took his mother’s life and then took his own life. It was guns,” O’Brien said. “I think people are really sick of all the conversation around it and then we never actually do anything. Maybe in this nation people are just tired of that at some point.”