Reacting to the shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, Maryland first lady and judge Katie O’Malley told The Daily Caller that she does not “understand why somebody needs an AK-47” or an “arsenal,” but stopped short of calling for President Barack Obama to push Congress on enacting gun control laws.
“We need to learn more about that [the incident], but, again, you know, this access to weapons and the hate that some people have and just the combination of those two things are really what make these tragedies like the one [Sunday], as well as the one that happened in Colorado, something that we need, on a national level, to start talking about and start reviewing what we’re doing and how we are making these guns so accessible,” she told TheDC at the U.S. Department of Education’s Bullying Prevent Summit on Monday. “I certainly agree that people are the ones pulling the triggers, but why are we making it so easy for people to get these weapons?”
The shooter, Wade Michael Page, had reportedly been on federal investigators radar before the incident. The shooting resulted in the deaths of seven people, including Page.
“I don’t know why anybody needs an AK-47. I certainly do appreciate hunters and their sporting reasons for having weapons, and I appreciate people who want to have weapons for their safety. … I don’t understand why somebody needs an AK-47 or why somebody needs to have an arsenal. I don’t understand why we can’t get a better control of that as a country,” said O’Malley, a Baltimore City District Court Judge.
When asked if Obama should work with Congress on gun control legislation, Katie O’Malley said, “I think President Obama’s doing a great job and I’m not going to be a critic at all about anything that he’s done with regards to that issue. I think that he’s — in all the areas that he’s dealing with these different issues — that he’s doing a wonderful job.”
In the video interview, O’Malley praised the Obama administration for their performance on the issue of bullying in public schools.
“What [the federal government is] doing, is they’re being a model to have states make up their own policies, like we’ve done in Maryland. Because you can’t have the federal government telling states and their Departments of Education what they have to do; or within their Health Departments, what they must do. But I think the models that we’ve tried to use are the reporting stats — keeping the incidents reported and tracking them to see what, in fact, is an area that we should be more concerned about; why are they reporting more in one area and not in another. So they’ve just been a great model for the states to adopt their own individual efforts to combat this,” she told TheDC.