'He has to sell ads': John Cornyn explains why Fox News' Tucker Carlson is attacking the gun bill

WASHINGTON, D.C. — This week, the Fox News network's Tucker Carlson attacked Sen. Jonn Cornyn (R-TX) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) over their support of the gun bill. Cornyn, however, doesn't buy the insults.

Calling them "apostates," Carlson sounded the alarm that Cornyn and McConnell are coming for people's guns. Over the weekend, Cornyn was booed by the Texas Republican Party members at his state's convention.

"Guess he has to sell ads," Cornyn said of Carlson when asked by Raw Story.

He also said that being booed by the base isn't a problem because the overwhelming majority of the Republican coalition believes in gun safety.

"Well, the base is, uh, the Republican Party is a coalition," he claimed. "But, I've seen the polling that says that all sorts of things that we are doing are pretty popular. But, that's not necessarily the reason why we're doing it — just because it's popular. We're doing it to save lives."

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While gun safety legislation enjoys support from the majority of Americans, the party isn't as supportive of such legislation. That said, Cornyn was just reelected in his state and he's not up for reelection again for another four years.

Cornyn also told Raw Story earlier this week that many Republicans didn't support the cloture vote because they didn't get a chance to read the bill. A cloture vote is simply to break the filibuster, not to vote on the bill. It was more than 24 hours later that the Senate began debating the bill.

With additional reporting from Matt Laslo.