(CNSNews.com) – Former Vice President Mike Pence criticized Democrats’ attempts at taking away guns from law-abiding American citizens in reaction to shooting massacres, instead calling for the death penalty with an accelerated appeal and more mental health facilities.
“Ignoring the motivations of the trans activist that killed three children and three adults that Christian school in Nashville and ignoring the mental health challenges of the man who killed five people and injured eight others in Louisville, President Biden and the Democrats have returned to the same tired arguments about gun control and gun confiscation. We don’t need gun control. We need crime control,” he told the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum leadership forum in Indianapolis.
“We do not need lectures about the liberties of law-abiding citizens. We need solutions to protect our kids. So I say to Joe Biden and the gun-control extremists, give up your pipe dreams of gun compensation in this free society. Stop endangering our lives with gun bans and stop trampling on the rights of the American people every time tragedy happens,” the former vice president said.
“Instead you could actually join us in doing things that would bring real solutions and enhance safety to America's families. You could take steps to end violent crime in major cities. You could confront the scourge of mental health in this country that is claiming lives every year, and while you're at it, why don't you secure the southern border of the united States of America and end the tidal wave of illegal immigrants and drugs pouring into our city,” Pence said.
He said that he’s “tired of the excuses, the predictable blame shifting, the pointless calls for gun control against law-abiding Americans.” Furthermore, he said he’s “tired of senseless violence and the loss of life that could be prevented if our leaders would support law enforcement, protect our schools, institutionalize the obviously mentally ill, and enact legislation to ensure that anyone thinking of heinous acts of mass shooting knows that they will face justice and face justice swiftly.”
Those are real solutions, and begins with electing leaders. Who will stand without apology with the men and women of law enforcement and end the defund the police movement once and for all.
You know, the police officers in Nashville and Louisville rushed in without regard to the personal safety and even engaged the assailants after they were injured. They deserve the thanks and gratitude and admiration of every American. So we need to support and back the blue.
Secondly, with Joe Biden spending trillions of dollars on their liberal agenda, I think the time has come for leaders in our nation's capital to give every community in the country the funds to place armed resource officers in every public and private school in America.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, right after I was elected governor in 2012, we enacted legislation in the Hoosier state to do just that. The most prosperous nation in the history of the world can afford to protect our kids. It will just take leadership to do it.
So stand with law enforcement to protect our kids. Finally, the assailants in the most recent attacks were taken up by too many mass shooters languish in prison for years. Men and women, I do not have to tell you, justice delayed is justice denied.
It is inconceivable to me, that the shooter who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, is languishing in a Florida prison. I believe the time has come to institute a federal death penalty statute with accelerated appeal to ensure that those who engage in mass shootings face execution in months, not years.
Finally, with so much violence taking place at the hands of those with severe mental illness, the answer to mass shootings is not fewer guns, but, it is more institutional mental health in this country. In the 1960's liberals emptied our psych wards, only to fill our streets and ultimately our prisons with the mentally ill. Today more than 20% of our prison population have serious mental illness.
The truth is these people should not be in prison because They never should've been allowed on the streets to commit the crimes that they committed. One of my last acts as governor of Indiana before I became your vice president was we broke ground here in the future state on the first new mental health hospital to be built in 30 years.
Men and women, we have got to get back to institutional mental health care in this country, families with someone who is struggling, a threat to themselves or a threat to others has to have a place to send that family member other than the county lockup. We have got to rebuild institutional mental health care in America.
While the other side talks reflexively about gun control, these are real solutions. Backing the blue, protecting our kids, advancing policies that’ll ensure the that justice is swept, and dealing with the dangerously mentally ill with men -- institutional care. It will take new leadership to get these done.
When the government allows rampant crime or even worse when it encourages rampant crime by lax prosecutors in our major cities, government’s enabling assault not just on the American people but on liberty itself. I do not need to tell you the Constitution of the United States is the greatest charter for freedom in the history of mankind. It is the foundation of who we are – the most prosperous and free nation the world has ever known.