Governor Rick Scott recently made national headlines by releasing an attack ad on a private citizen who called him an “as*hole* for cutting Medicaid and stomping all over access to Obamacare. So, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to imagine he’s not the most sensitive government official, even when his own state faces a tragedy like the Orlando nightclub shooting. Scott is a huge supporter of the Second Amendment, and the NRA Institute for Legislative Action regularly praises him. They especially did so in 2014 when he signed five pro-gun bills in one day. At the time, the NRA-ILA noted that he’s the most gun-happy governor that Florida has ever known.
Scott also leads a state that has gone to great lengths — as Anderson Cooper sublimely illustrated earlier this week — to suppress same-sex marriage. For these reasons, the gay community wasn’t impressed when Scott initially addressed the shooting as an attack on “the gays” and posted a somber photo for the occasion. Stuff like this happened in response:
https://twitter.com/gdhiers/status/742847133095583744
NRA paid 27 million to your party last year. Why are you sad and saying prayers? You made the way for this to happen Rick!
— Brand Manufactory (@eoilco) June 14, 2016
Well, Scott shook off the criticism. He swiftly refocused upon his Second Amendment platform while speaking to CNN on Friday. The governor managed to evade repeated inquiries about how easy Florida makes it to buy a gun. He sees the entire matter as revolving around ISIS and terrorism, and to Scott, gun control is a non-issue:
“Well, nobody would think that anybody on a terrorist watch list should have a gun, right? We all can agree that we shouldn’t, we don’t want someone like that to be walking around with any weapons. The 2nd Amendment didn’t kill anybody. This is ISIS. This is evil. This is radical Islam. I’m tired of what’s going on in the country – that we’re not focusing enough on ISIS.
“Just remember, the 2nd Amendment has been around for 200 years. That’s not what killed innocent people. Evil killed innocent people. There is going to be a time to have a conversation about what we do to make our state, our city, our country save again. But let’s have a conversation about we destroy ISIS. Where is that conversation?”
Ah, yes. The old “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument. Scott continued to dance around the issue even after Pamela Brown pointed out how it’s easier to buy an AR-15 than a pistol. He only wants to talk about ISIS, and that’s all he’s gonna do. Here’s that CNN interview clip.