Booker compares gun control fight to Civil Rights movement 3 hrs ago
Cory Booker on health care, gun control and 'governing to unite this country again'
2020 presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker is optimistic about his comprehensive gun control proposal's chances of success despite the partisan pushback it received in the week following its release, and compared to the potential battle over its implementation to the civil rights movement in an interview on "This Week" that aired Sunday.
"People thought [civil rights legislation] was impossible, but they changed the terms of the debate by expanding the moral imagination of this country," Booker, D-N.J., told ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl, just prior to becoming the first member of the 21-candidate Democratic primary field to open a campaign office in South Carolina.
On Monday, Booker announced his sweeping gun control plan, which includes calls for universal background checks, an assault weapon ban, a safety training program and mandatory gun licensing and registration. The proposals were swiftly met with resistance from Republicans, but the New Jersey senator said Saturday, just days after school shootings in Colorado and Georgia, that he could not continue to stand by as gun violence became "normalized."
"In my short time on this planet, 50 years, we've had more people killed by gun violence than every single war combined from the Revolutionary War through World War I, World War II, Vietnam," he said. "And what have we done? Massacre in the synagogue. We do nothing. Massacre here in South Carolina in a church. We do nothing. Massacre in my mom’s city of Las Vegas. We do nothing."
© Andrew Kelly/Reuters U.S. Senator Cory Booker speaks at his Hometown Kickoff event, part of the senator's "Justice for All" tour, the first such national tour of his presidential campaign in Newark, N.J., April 13, 2019.
The gun violence prevention proposal joins criminal justice reform -- an issue Booker has led bipartisan efforts to address in the Senate -- as the centerpieces of the former Newark, New Jersey, mayor's presidential campaign, which has thus far found itself firmly in the middle of the expansive pack, based on the latest polling.
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Poster Comment:
Booker has been caught up in the gun control debate and is dead wrong about what the Founders intended when they gave us the Bill of Rights.