Video: Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA03) Says Rs Refuse to Act on Gun Safety, So If Voters Want Action, They’re “going to have to change…the people that are there”

See below for video and highlights of Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA03) speaking on MSNBC about Republicans blocking crucial gun safety legislation, about President Biden’s executive order on policing reform, etc.

• “Republicans in the Senate will have to answer for themselves. We have a situation now where there are things that can be done to reduce the chance that these kinds of incidents will happen and yet we can pass them in the House they get blocked in the Senate by the Republican unanimous opposition. The Republicans have a party position that you can see it since Sandy Hook that they don’t want to do anything about gun safety. Their leader of their party spoke at the National Rifle Association convention just this week…and so that’s what we’re dealing with.”
• “Democrats will make it clear that we want to do something and the response to the public will have to be that you’re going to have to make this a political issue; if you want change, you’re going to have to change…the people that are there. And when the public makes it clear that they’re not going to tolerate people just sitting on the sidelines wanting to do nothing about gun safety, when they make it clear they’re not going to tolerate that anymore, things will change.
• …when Sandy Hook happened and…the Republicans were in control, we couldn’t even get a hearing on gun safety. And so…we know the kinds of bills that need to be taken up. The one most frequently mentioned is the red flag laws, the background checks, doing something about assault weapons, if nothing more than just increasing the age – you have to be 26 to rent a car, how can you be 18 to buy an assault weapon?…There are the things like the size of the magazines; most of the intervention in these mass shootings takes place when the shooter is fumbling with the magazine, changing magazines. If you’ve got a 50-round magazine or 100-round magazine, which we’ve seen in some of these, you can do a lot more damage than if it’s a eight or ten-round magazine…we know what needs to be done and we’ll be making the proposals to give everyone an opportunity to be on the record…”
• President Biden’s executive orders on police reform will “be policy as long as he’s in in office. It also had provisions for de-escalation and implicit bias…it covered a lot of ground. Regrettably, it only covers federal agencies, but it sets a framework for others around the country to notice what important issues need to be addressed. There’s one thing that people don’t mention very often and that is that most of the things that we were considering are actually local issues; you can get rid of chokeholds just by having the mayor tell the chief of police no chokeholds, and if he keeps doing it just fire them. A lot of these things can be solved on a local basis if the voters will push on their local elected officials to make sure the police are doing the right thing. Sometimes the police carry on like they’re not subject to political influence. We need to make sure that local citizens press their local elected officials to have some of these implemented on a local basis.”
• “But a lot of things like…giving military equipment to localities, I mean if a locality needs tanks and that kind of thing, call out the National Guard. You don’t need the local police in a small county with tanks and bazookas and that kind of thing.”