Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) on Tuesday got more than he bargained for when he questioned a witness at a Senate hearing about the causes of gun-related crime in the city of Chicago.
While questioning Dr. Megan Ranney of the Yale School of Public Health, Kennedy asked for her opinion on why Chicago "has become America's largest outdoor shooting range."
He then asked her a leading question about whether this was because law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry guns or whether it's because there were too many hardened criminals on the loose.
Ranney, however, was quick to remind the senator that his own state was something of a "shooting gallery" as well.
"Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri actually have higher firearm death rates," she informed him.
In fact, Kennedy's home state of Louisiana is perpetually at the top of the list for states with the highest murder rates in the country, and the latest numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics show that Louisiana had 21.3 homicides per 100,000 people in 2021, second only to Mississippi, which recorded 23.7 homicides per 100,000 people.
This didn't seem to faze Kennedy, however.
"What about Chicago?" he insisted.
"I don't live in Chicago," she replied. "It's not my primary area of research."
Ranney then speculated that crime in cities such as Chicago was caused by a combination of "easy access to firearms" and "environmental conditions" and "lack of great education."
Watch the video below or at this link.
