Following the tragic deaths of nine black church-goers in Charleston at the hands of an alleged white supremacist, NBC host Chuck Todd featured a segment with only black murders who were regretful of using guns.
On Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press, Todd kicked off a discussion about gun control with a video of convicted murderers at Sing Sing Correctional Facility talking about how they wished they had never picked up a gun.
“The circumstances you are about to see are very different from the racist violence in Charleston,” Todd explained. “In this case, in the inmates are African-American that you’re going to hear from. But their lessons remain important.”
“And we simply ask you to look at this as a color-blind issue that’s about just simply gun violence,” he added.
Following the video clip of several tearful black men who said that they never intended to kill anyone when they picked up a gun, Todd returned to his panel of guests for comments.
“Passing a law isn’t going to change the culture,” Todd opined.
“But passing the right law — passing a law that frankly we’re not going to pass would take a lot of guns out of circulation, would make the gun not the normal thing one reaches for when one wants to aggrandize ones self-esteem,” columnist Eugene Robinson argued.
Robinson agreed that the video of the black men had been “powerful,” but he said that it did not fit the circumstances.
“There wasn’t a terribly diverse set of people who were talking,” the columnist observed. “Right now, we’re talking about a horrific crime committed by a white man, we’re talking about the search for two escaped murderers who are white men.”
“So we should point out that this is not just an African-American problem.”
“No, no, no, no,” Todd replied. “And it wasn’t intended to be that way.”
Watch the video below from NBC, broadcast June 21, 2015.
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