Megyn Kelly won’t be moved to change her position on gun reform despite Wednesday’s mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, saying there’s no reason to even discuss it further.
Kelly, during her SiriusX podcast show on Thursday, said it was “pointless to spend time on the gun debate, they’re not going away.”
Instead, Kelly added that “the mental health problem” should be the focus.
“I really firmly believe what we need is a mental health facility to which a loving parent would send her son,” she said. “We need a facility that is jail-like, it’s a secure facility, but it is one to which a loving family member would feel comfortable committing his or her son or daughter, uncle, cousin, and one in which civil liberties are going to have to be bent a bit.”
Kelly pointed out that the suspected shooter, Robert Card, spent two weeks in a mental health facility this summer. After asking why Card was released, Kelly answered her own question.
“We don’t have the inclination or the funding to keep them or the resources,” she said.
She then turned the conversation to guest Kmele Foster, who revealed a family member of his struggled with their mental health and gained access to a gun. Eventually, that family member began “perpetrating a string of shootings” while the rest of his family debated whether or not the family member could be involved.
“I think there is a rather profound degree of people having an ability to not want to believe that someone in their family might be in a position where they are a threat to other people, a danger to themselves,” he said.
Foster echoed Kelly’s call to address “our national mental health crisis.” The “Fifth Column” podcast host said that he thinks change lies in “families and communities having really sober conversations about what we do for people who are in distress.”
Kelly agreed and added: “There are over 400 million guns in America. They’re not going away. In no world are the semi-automatic guns ever going away and they can do as much damage as the AR-15s.”
Of her suggestion that the gun control focus should be on mental health facilities that can house people who have been flagged for concern, Kelly said, “They’re going to have to be protected, but they’re gonna have to be – they can’t be concern number one. Mine and yours and our kids, those civil liberties are the ones they’re going to have to matter.”
“Not those of the guy who’s hearing voices and is threatening to shoot places up and was just on a mental health hold inside a facility over the summer,” Kelly continued. “That guy is going to lose a little.”
Watch the conversation in the video above.
