Sen. Marco Rubio Explains Why More Gun Laws Won’t ‘Stop This From Happening’

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., spoke Thursday about the shooting that left 17 dead and 14 wounded at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Above is video of a portion of  Rubio’s remarks and below is a transcript. 

And so, hence the challenge for why it’s so hard to find something that works. And there are a lot of proposals. And I’ll share the ones because I’ve heard them before and I hear them today.

And I’m not diminishing them. I don’t want this to be taken as, “Because it won’t work I don’t even want to hear your argument.” I understand, I really do. You read in the newspaper that they used a certain kind of gun and therefore let’s make it harder to get those kinds of guns. I don’t have some sort of de facto religious objection to that or some ideological commitment to that per se.

There’s all kinds of guns that are outlawed and weaponry that’s outlawed and/or a special category.

The problem is we did that once and it didn’t work for a lot of reasons. One of them is there is already millions of these in the street. And those things, they last a hundred years. And so, you could pass a law that makes it hard to get this kind of gun in a new condition, but you’re going to struggle to keep it out of the hands of someone who’s decided that’s what they want to use because there’s so many of them out there already that would be grandfathered in.

You can do a background check. The truth is, in almost all these cases I cited, the individual either erroneously passed a background check or would’ve passed it or did.

Again, even if they couldn’t pass the background check, then they could buy them the way MS-13 does and other gangs and other street elements do, from the black market. Again, not because we shouldn’t have the background check. I’m just trying to be clear and honest here.

If someone’s decided “I’m going to commit this crime,” they’ll find a way to get the gun to do it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a law that makes it harder, it just means understand, to be honest, it isn’t going to stop this from happening.