FBN Guest Cites Chicago to Reject Gun Control: ‘We Need Guns in the Hands of Good People’

As Fox Business Network took on the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Tuesday morning, they inevitably waded into the newly reignited gun control debate.

“I’m a strong proponent of the Second Amendment,” started Darrin Porcher, a former Army officer and FBN guest. “And when we look at places like Chicago — Chicago has the toughest gun laws in the country, however look at the propensity for violence in Chicago.”

Since Sunday night’s horrific shooting in Vegas, in which a 64-year-old man used an arsenal of some 20 guns to rain bullets down on a crowd of concert-goers, the gun control debate has raged back onto the main stage — with opponents citing Chicago as evidence that gun regulation does not reduce crime.

A few quick points:

— Chicago does not have the strictest gun laws in the country (it’s laws are comparable to other major U.S. cities, like New York and Los Angeles.)

— While Chicago suffers from extraordinary gun violence, when adjusted for population, it does not have the highest murder rate in America (it ranked 8th in 2016.)

— Most importantly, most (some 60%) of Chicago’s illegal guns recovered during arrests between 2009 and 2013 came from out of state, where gun control laws are more relaxed.

Porcher continued, deploying the time-tested argument that ‘good guy with a gun’ argument — pointing to the church shooting in Tennessee last month, in which the gunman was thwarted by an armed usher.

“We need guns to protect ourselves,” Porcher said. “We need good people in the hands of guns to protect ourselves from bad people in the hands of guns.” (It is unclear how ‘good people with guns’ could have stopped the Las Vegas attack, where the assailant fired automatic rifles at a crowd from a hotel window hundreds of yards away.)

The Mornings With Maria panel then went on to note that automatic weapons are illegal, and marveled at how Stephen Paddock, the attacker, could have got his hands on such a weapon. FBN’s Dagen McDowell noted that there are easily accessible devices that can transform a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic weapon.

“What happens in Chicago is that you have bad guys that are in possession of guns,” Porcher concluded. “The good guys don’t have guns. Look at the police department, how does the police department counter bad people? With guns.”

“We need guns in the hands of good people.”

Watch above, via Fox Business Network.