Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) once again demonstrated why he’s among the most blunt voices on Capitol Hill as he threw cold water on the left’s knee-jerk fixation with gun control in the aftermath of Monday's deadly Midtown Manhattan shooting that left five people dead, including an NYPD officer. Kennedy, appearing with Sean Hannity, directly called out what’s become a predictable routine from progressives: a fresh crime, and immediately, another chorus calling to shred the Second Amendment.
Kennedy, who has long opposed additional gun control legislation, made it clear he expects Democrats to push for more restrictions in response to the attack.
“On Capitol Hill, probably beginning in the morning, there’ll be the inevitable call by some of my colleagues for more gun control laws,” Kennedy predicted.
But, as he put it bluntly, “We’ve got hundreds of gun control laws, Sean, maybe thousands… We don’t need more gun control. We need more idiot control.”
Kennedy was unwavering in his characterization of the shooter and the crime. “I believe there’s objective evil in this world,” he said. “And we saw it today.”
He dismissed any anticipated sympathy for the shooter, saying, “I don’t want to hear anyone feeling sorry for this guy. ‘He was confused.’ ‘He was just sick.’ ‘His mom or daddy didn’t love him enough.’ All that may be true, but from the bottom of my heart, I don’t care.”
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The Louisiana senator also criticized the broader climate of hostility toward law enforcement in major cities like New York. “There are a lot of people in political leadership today who believe that cops are a bigger problem than criminals,” he said. “If a cop has to shoot a criminal, it’s always the cop’s fault. But if a criminal shoots a cop, it’s the gun’s fault.”
As New York City remains embroiled in debates over policing policies ranging from defunding the police to replacing officers with social workers, Kennedy warned against policies that undermine public safety. “Police aren’t perfect,” he said, “but they’re the only distance between us and whack jobs like this guy who killed these innocent people today.”
He went further, calling for a return to more assertive policing measures. “New York’s gonna have to face the issue of whether we should bring back more aggressive stop and frisk,” Kennedy said, referring to the tactic ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court but later abandoned under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. “The crime went up as soon as he did.”
Although there is little public information about the shooter at this stage, early reports indicate that the attack was not random. “It seems to be targeted,” Hannity noted. “He seemed to know exactly where he wanted to go.”
Kennedy’s remarks offered a stark reminder that evil is not just theoretical—it has consequences, and those consequences are now being felt by the families of the victims. “I don’t know why bad things happen to good people,” Kennedy said. “If I make it to heaven, I’m gonna ask.”
Kennedy is absolutely right. The radical left seizes on every tragedy as an excuse to chip away at the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans. They push the same tired agenda, demanding more gun control that punishes the innocent while doing nothing to stop the evil at the heart of the violence. This horrific act took place despite New York having among the strictest gun laws in the nation — proof, yet again, that oppressive laws fail to deliver their advertised safety. Not a single law they’ve passed or proposed would have prevented the carnage we saw yesterday.
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