The Democrat-laden House Oversight Committee demanded apologies from CEOs of gun manufacturers Ruger and Daniel Defense on Wednesday for selling weapons used by murderers in recent mass shootings.
The chairwoman of the committee, Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), asked the CEO of Smith & Wesson to show up for the grilling as well, but he declined. In her letter “inviting” the three company presidents to the inquisition, she wrote:
The information you provided has heightened the Committee’s concern that your company is continuing to profit from the sale and marketing of weapons of war to civilians despite the harm these weapons cause, is failing to track instances or patterns where your products are used in crimes, and is failing to take other reasonable precautions to limit injuries and deaths caused by your firearms.
She picked on those three companies deliberately, as their products were involved in the Uvalde, Texas, and Highland Park, Illinois, shootings.
This set the stage for her grilling of the two CEOs who agreed to subject themselves and their companies to the attack. The weapons are the offending criminals in those recent shootings and, by clear inference, so were the company executives.
Behind her was a white board showing how much each company made in recent years from the sale of their products.
She began:
The gun industry has flooded our neighborhoods, our schools, and even our churches and synagogues with these deadly weapons.… How many more American children need to die before your compan[ies] stop selling assault weapons?
Each president began to present a reasonable response to such a provocative and intentionally offensive question, but each time Maloney cut them off, citing time limitations. She, of course, had plenty of time to rant but precious little time was granted for any response.
However, Daniel Defense president Marty Daniel was able to declare: “These acts are committed by murderers. The murderers are responsible.”
Ruger’s president, when given a chance to respond to the outrageous question posed by Maloney, refused to answer directly but instead argued that a gun is “an inanimate object,” adding that “it is wrong to deprive citizens of their constitutional right to purchase a lawful weapon … because of the criminal acts of [a few] wicked people.”
He said, “The difference is in the intent of the individual possessing it,” and then added that her committee ought to look at the criminals using the weapons illegally rather than on the makers:
We respectfully submit [that] should be the focus of any investigation into the root causes of criminal violence involving firearms.
A Republican member of the committee, Jody Hice (R-Ga.), called out Maloney for her misleading and offensive questioning: “It’s absolutely disgusting to me and unthinkable … the height of irresponsibility and lack of accountability [by Maloney]. My colleagues seem to forget that the American people have a right to own guns.”
Another Republican on the committee, Clay Higgins (R-La.), called out Maloney and her cohorts: “What my colleagues are doing [here] is unbelievably beyond the pale of anything reasonable or constitutional. Will we have that debate reasonably … through the legislative branch? Or will [the issue] be settled on the front porch of Americans, when the FBI and ATF show up to seize legally owned weapons?”
Happily, the confrontation that Maloney hoped would capture national exposure and attention failed miserably. As of this writing, there were fewer than 5,000 views of the committee’s inquisition that was posted on YouTube.
