“The View” co-hosts sparred over gun legislation and red flag laws Thursday following the surge of mass shootings in 2023.
The panel entered a heated debate over whether stricter gun laws should be implemented in the U.S. after a six-year-old boy shot his teacher at Richneck Elementary School in Virginia. Co-host Sunny Hostin accused her fellow co-hosts of ridiculing her after she previously argued that solely passing red flags is not the solution to mitigating the number of shootings in the nation.
“When I said that red flag laws are not enough, I was skewered at this table, I was skewered across America. There’s a red flag law in Virginia,” Hostin said.
“Skewered?” co-host Whoopi Goldberg said.
“I support red flag laws,” co-host Sara Haines said.
“But they don’t work!” Hostin said.
“No, they’re not being implemented properly,” Haines continued.
“And that’s what I said, they’re not being implemented properly!” Hostin interjected.
“But that doesn’t mean you give up on it,” Haines said.
Red flag laws allow for a state court to temporarily confiscate the firearms of an individual convicted of a violent crime. Nineteen U.S. states, including Massachusetts and Florida, have implemented such laws.
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin quickly changed the subject by commending the shot teacher, Abigail Zwerner, for ushering her students out of the classroom after sustaining a gunshot wound. Sparks flew when Griffin then argued most gun owners do not commit crimes with their firearms and thus mental illness is tied to the growing number of shootings. (RELATED: ‘Middle Finger To New York’: ‘The View’ Laments SCOTUS Decision On NY Concealed Carry Law)
“Gun homicide rate is 23 times higher in this country than the entire European Union,” co-host Joy Behar said, appearing to read from a statistic. “They have mentally ill people in the European Union, don’t they? So, the one thing they don’t have is access to guns. So this whole mental health idea is baloney. Baloney.”
“I don’t think it’s baloney though, because again, I can own a gun my whole life and never use it to commit a crime,” Griffin argued. “You can’t separate the criminal from the weapon … There’s 400 million guns…”
“People with mental illness are more likely to be victims of a crime than attacking other people,” Hostin said.
“You also can’t separate the pornography and video games … and the lack of empathy and the racism, you name it all, it is layered beyond belief and it’s not as simple as ‘We have tons of guns, get rid of them,'” Haines interjected. “Some people have them illegally, some people have them legally.”
In the following segment, Behar issued a correction for saying that the mass shootings in the U.S. are comparable to Venezuela or Brazil. In fact, the U.S. is between those countries in the number of gun deaths, not mass shootings. Suicide accounted for more than half of gun-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, according to a Pew Research study and U.S. News.
A study conducted by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit examined 63 active shooters and found one-quarter of them had been diagnosed with a mental illness, according to the Metrowest Health Foundation. Additional studies found active shooters act out of grievances, anger or depression rather than “impulse,” the foundation continued.
Thirty-two percent of American adults said they own a gun, and 44% said they live with a gun owner, according to a 2020 Gallup poll. Sixty-seven percent of gun owners said they own a gun for self-defense purposes, and 38% have a firearm for hunting, Pew Research reported in 2017.