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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsChris Matthews: What Robert Kennedy Knew About Gun Control
By CHRIS MATTHEWS OCT. 20, 2017
Roseburg, Ore. Its one of those American places Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino now branded by a mass shooting. On Oct. 1, 2015, a 26-year-old shot and killed eight fellow students and a professor at the local community college. When the towns name was still hot with grief, the watchword from the gun people was politics. No one was to talk about what might have prevented it.
It has been just like that this month. Two years to the day after Roseburg, a man killed 58 people and himself in Las Vegas. Again, the gun-rights lobby warned against speaking now, of all times, of the case for gun control. Last week, House Speaker Paul Ryan ruled out action even on the bump stocks that the Las Vegas shooter used to make his semiautomatic rifles shoot like Tommy guns.
At Roseburg, someone did try raising the alarm earlier, much earlier in fact, early enough to have done some good.
On May 27, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, made the case right on the eve of that states primary for doing something about the ease with which people got guns. He was warned not to dare try it: The local sheriff said there would be hostile demonstrators facing him, knowing the personal interest he had in the subject.
Kennedy went ahead anyway. There he stood on the steps of the county courthouse looking out over a crowd of 1,500; before him stood wary lumberjacks, most of them gun owners, many of them carrying signs with pro-gun, anti-Kennedy messages.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/opinion/chris-matthews-robert-kennedy-gun-control.html
H2O Man
(73,581 posts)madokie
(51,076 posts)when RFK was gunned down we would be living in a totally different world today. We would be well on our way to equality for all, worldwide.
Robert F. Kennedy was a visionary
mahina
(17,691 posts)With his murder just keeps getting deeper as we move into the future.
thucythucy
(8,086 posts)Other than the murder of Abraham Lincoln (by an avowed white supremacist) the murder of RFK was the most consequential incidence of gun violence in American history.