Gun control laws only control the activities of "legitimate people," not the people who should not have weapons, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Friday, one day after a shooter killed several people at an Oregon community college.
"People who rob stores, people who rob banks, and people who are insane and want to go ahead and murder don't follow the gun control laws," Giuliani told
Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "You and I follow them. So [they] control the behavior of people who can be regulated."
On Thursday, just hours after news broke of the nation's latest mass school shootings,
President Barack Obama said, in an address that angered the nation's gun rights activist groups, that he could "just imagine the press release" coming out, saying advocates will argue to have "more guns" and "fewer gun safety laws."
"I think the president has very little knowledge of what causes crime or how you reduce crime," Giuliani said.
Instead, he advocates the use of "stop and frisk" laws such as New York had until this year, when Mayor Bill de Blasio outlawed them.
"Take New York and Chicago," Giuliani said. "Chicago has 2.5 times the murders of New York and the] same gun control laws. Why? Because in New York, at least up until now, there was a much more aggressive stop and frisk policy, which meant we took the guns."
Other nations have gun problems too, he pointed out, and they have murder problems. And we've had mass murders in Denmark where they have very strict, almost — very strict gun laws almost nonexistent guns."
The reality, he said, is in the "behavior of people, it's not the guns. Go to South America [where] you've got a heck of a lot more murders than you do in the United States."
Gun control is "sensible," he conceded, but "that's not going to significantly reduce crime. What's going to reduce crime is arresting people, stopping them, frisking them. You've got to take the guns away from the bad guys, [who] don't go into an office and register."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.