A Republican Governor has side-stepped the national debate surrounding gun control in the US, with him pointing to video games and music as the cause of the Florida shooting.
Matt Bevin, the governor of Kentucky, has decided to return to an argument that was seemingly left behind in the ’90s, saying that the shooting in Parkland’s Stoneman Douglas High School was the result of children having access to violent video games, music, and TV shows.
“We need to have an honest conversation as to what should and should not be allowed in the United States as it relates to the things being put in the hands of our young people,” Bevin told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
“I’m a big believer in the First Amendment and right to free speech, but there are certain things that are so graphic as it relates to violence, and things that are so pornographic on a whole another front that we allow to pass under the guise of free speech, which arguably are,” Bevin said. “But there is zero redemptive value. There is zero upside to any of this being in the public domain, let alone in the minds and hands and homes of our young people.”
Bevin told the Enquirer that guns were not the issue, as when he visited a school in New England, students had brought in firearms for show-and-tell.
“Sometimes they’d be in kids’ lockers,” Bevin said. “Nobody even thought about shooting other people with them. So it’s not a gun problem.”
The Florida shooting saw an armed 19-year-old, who had expressed his ambition to become a “professional school shooter” on social media, kill and injure students and Stoneman Douglas High School with an AR-15 rifle. Since the shooting, the young survivors of the shooting have rallied for tighter gun control laws, with marches and rallies being planned across the country.
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