Sports reporter Dale Hansen of Dallas/Fort Worth’s WFAA-TV first came to fame denouncing homophobia in the NFL while defending gay draft pick Michael Sam back in 2014. Since then, he’s dedicated a whole segment of his broadcast to sharing his thoughts on various social issues and tragic events. Last week, he spoke out on the GOP baseball practice shooting that wounded a five people, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Hansen said that since the shooting happened on a baseball field, people thought he might have something.
“Say what, exactly?” Hansen started out. “What can I say that I haven’t said too many times before? Because a nut with a gun has happened before and it will happen again.”
“But since this shooting was aimed at Republicans by a man who was apparently a Bernie Sanders supporter in the last election, we’ve now reduced the argument to liberals against conservatives. Some people have actually said, ‘Name me a conservative with a gun who has shot a liberal.’ Dylan Roof, to name one — and I thought of that Confederate flag-waving nut without really thinking.”
Hansen then slammed the ‘conservative versus liberal’ argument as ignorant and perpetuated by people who “really don’t think that much.”
“Those of us who believe in gun control don’t want your guns,” he declared. “Those of us who don’t hunt don’t want you to stop. But we have to stop the madness of a nut with a gun, especially the guns that serve no purpose other than to shoot somebody.”
He cited a WHO study that compared America to 22 other high-income countries, and found that although the U.S. has half the population of those other countries, its gun-related deaths accounted for 82% of the all the countries combined.
“Is that really who we are?” Is that really the best we can be? Is that the America we want to give to our children? We spend billions to fight a foreign terrorist we cannot see, and someone dies every day in America because of a nut with a gun — a nut with a gun that we don’t know how to stop like 22 other countries already have.”
Watch the full segment in the video below, uploaded to Facebook by WFAA-TV:
Featured image via screen grab
