House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Tuesday said Congress is focusing on “mental illness reform” to prevent mass shootings in the future, but defended Congress’ passage in February of a bill revoking a regulation preventing certain people with mental illnesses from buying guns.
House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), who was shot in June during a Republican congressional baseball practice, said at Ryan’s weekly press conference that he and his wife were praying “for the people that were involved in the Nevada shooting.”
“I continue to just let everybody know who prayed for me during those tough times how much it meant,” Scalise said of his own recovery. “It was tremendously uplifting and gave me and my family a lot of strength during those tough times.”
“We’re all just reeling from this horror that we witnessed in Las Vegas,” Ryan added.
He called the shooting, which left 59 people dead and hundreds more injured, “just awful.”
Asked what Congress is doing to try and prevent such tragedies in the future, Ryan cited “mental illness reform.”
“So then was it a mistake to make it easier for mentally ill people to get a gun?” a reporter asked.
Congress in February passed a bill rolling back an Obama-era regulation that would have added Social Security beneficiaries with mental illnesses assigned a financial manager to the national background check database as ineligible for gun ownership.
Ryan dismissed the question and moved on to another reporter, who pressed him on the same subject.
“There were people whose rights were being infringed,” Ryan replied. “It’s a little more complicated than you’re describing.”
He added, “Protecting people’s rights was very important, and that’s what that issue was all about.”
They could start by repealing the bill they enacted (and Trumpf signed) a few months ago, to allow the mentally ill to buy guns.
“Hypocrites” does not begin to describe these people.
How about my right to not be terrorized by random mass shootings? Or my right to feel confident when I put my five year old on the bus in the morning that she’s not going to get shot up in the hallway at school? Or my daughter’s right to not have to undergo mandatory shooter drills in kindergarten?
Such an ass.
You read a story about Ryan, and none of it makes any fucking sense. Ever.
Ryan is a RINO. R-H-I-N-O! He must be a homosexual for trying to handle this by banning crazy people from their constipational rights. We need to pass Sen. Roy Moore’s Good Guy With a Tank Act, and we need to do it NOW!
If every one of them concert goers had come equipped with a tank, not a one of them woulda been harmed and they could have returned fire to that thahr Mandalay Bay Hotel.
I just want all them tanks to be American made – none of them Mexican tanks that are costing us so many jobs.
Keep spinning, Paulie.