During a speech at the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) meeting on Tuesday, the president of the union, Randi Weingarten, called for the United States to follow the lead of “other great democracies” and ban guns, after a school shooting in Nashville. Weingarten began her address with a moment of silence for the victims of the shooting, which killed three children and three adults, before reigniting calls for a ban on “assault weapons.” Watch below:
Randi Weingarten comes out of the closet: she wants us disarmed just like Australia and New Zealand. pic.twitter.com/qSes4XRXSb
— Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) March 29, 2023
“Today, we renew our call for common sense gun safety legislation, including a ban on assault weapons. This is an epidemic,” Weingarten said.
She added, “It’s an epidemic that our great nation must solve. And how many lives will be shattered before we have the courage to do what Scotland did, what Australia did, what New Zealand did, what other great democracies do? We must solve this epidemic, and that’s up to us.”
Weingarten’s call for gun confiscation echoes the policies of other countries, such as Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand, which implemented gun bans after mass shootings. In the United Kingdom, Scotland played a key role in the ban on handguns, while Australia implemented a mandatory gun buyback program in 1996 for semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. New Zealand followed suit in 2019, enacting a ban on semi-automatic weapons just days after the Christchurch mosque shootings, which claimed 50 lives.
In a an appearance on MSNBC Weingarten stated that her words has been misinterpreted. “Frankly, I saw today in my speech when I called on us to do a moment of silence for the Tennessee Christian school to, you know, in a speech that I was giving to public school parents and teachers, but to also renew a call for the assault weapons ban. And then somebody doctored the speech and said I was calling to confiscate guns. So, all day long that’s what I’ve been dealing with,” Weingarten said.
