CNN Newsroom
April 29, 2023
7:35 p.m. Eastern
JIM ACOSTA: Getting back to when you were saying, "Washington is not going to fix this," a lot of people listen at home to that, and, I mean, you like to speak, you know, plain English to folks. A lot of people listened to what you just said and said, "Wait a minute, it is your job to fix this, and it's unacceptable to have mass shooting after mass shooting after mass shooting." Why not fix this? Get together -- get together with the Democrats and get it done?
CONGRESSMAN BILL BURCHETT (R-TN): Well, this happens a lot, Jim. That was cut off a little bit. I was speaking more from a Christian perspective. I also went on and said we need real revival in this country. I feel like we've turned from the Lord, and I know maybe that makes people's heads spin off sometimes when they hear somebody like me say that, but it's just --
ACOSTA: But there's Christianity in other countries, and they don't have mass shootings.
BURCHETT: Well, they don't have our freedom either, and they don't have a Second Amendment that -- and also, you want -- what happens is you'll take away the --
ACOSTA: But what about that point that you should be the ones to fix it? To say, "Well, we're not going to fix anything here in Washington," that's your job.
BURCHETT: Okay, she broke over 20 laws -- what law are you going to do? You know, now you have people that can print guns, you know. Timothy McVeigh, 150 pounds of fertilizer and diesel fuel -- he killed over 100 people, a bunch of innocent folks. And we've got evil in this world -- we've got to address it. We know we had a bill last year -- Marsha Blackburn had it in the Senate, and we had it over in the House that would have put guards in our schools, and it was blocked. The President said, "I want the guns -- we're not going to do this." And we weren't even allowed a hearing on it in the state -- in the House of Representatives -- in the people's House. Now, why wouldn't you want to put more people and secure -- and, you know, you enjoy that at CNN. You enjoy the fact that you can't walk into the headquarters of CNN -- there's an armed guard out front.
ACOSTA: But you can't put an -- you can't put an armed guard at a house -- I don't want to get into a back and forth with you, sir, but you couldn't put an armed guard at the house last night in Texas where the guy because he didn't want to stop shooting his guns -- went over and executed half the people in the house -- executed five people, including an eight-year-old child. There's no armed guard there.
BURCHETT: Tell me -- I don't know the situation there, but tell me how you get the guns back. How do you get them out? What are you going to do? There are just so many guns out there. I just think that we've got a mental health issue in this country. We ought to address that as well. And, you know, these red flag laws, some say they work -- some say they don't. I'd like to see some real numbers on that. We had a -- remember, we had an assault weapons ban in this country, and the Justice Department came back and said it's not reducing shootings at all. And so they did away with it.
ACOSTA: Well, there were some studies that said that it did reduce -- there were some studies that said it did reduce mass shootings, but, Congressman, I'm short on time. Let's have you back sometime, and let's talk about this some more.