Mark Kelly: It Doesn’t Make Sense a 19-Year-Old Can Buy an AR-15 But Not a Bud Light

WALLACE: OK. But one of the other questions is the gun. And I know one of the things you would like to see is a renewal of the assault weapon ban that was passed in the 1990s and may be a limit on the capacity of these high-capacity magazines. In fact, gun rights groups point out that the vast majority of murders in the country are not committed with assault 
weapons, they are committed with handguns.

I want to put up some statistics on that. According to the FBI, in 2016, murder victims by handguns, over 7,000. All the murders from rifles, shotguns, and other guns all in the hundreds.

So, are these assault weapons, the semiautomatic weapons, the AR-15, are they the real problem?

KELLY: That’s 100 percent correct, what you are saying. Most of murders, suicides are committed with handguns, clearly. But when an individual goes into a school or another place with a lot of people with an AR-15 or AR-15-like weapon, he has the ability to kill a lot of people much more quickly, the .223 round that’s fired out of an AR-15 moves at over 3,000 feet per second. It tumbles when it hits a body. It is much more effective at killing a lot of people all at once.

That’s why you see it’s often the gun of choice of mass shooters. Should a 19-year-old be able to buy an AR-15 but he can’t buy a Bud Light? That probably doesn’t make a lot of sense.

You see, we have come out, you know, for an assault weapons ban. You know, we often don’t talk about the hardware. You know, our organization is focused on keeping guns out of the hands of people that shouldn’t have them, felons, people who are — you know, show some form of dangerousness, domestic abusers, suspected terrorists —

WALLACE: But let me just tell you — and I — we got limited time. The fact is he went through a background check and he passed it. So, none of the alarms went off for him.

KELLY: That’s right.

WALLACE: I want to switch if I can, though, one of the —

KELLY: But, however, Florida — if Florida had one of these extremist protection orders, may be local law enforcement would have had the tools to take that firearm away from him months before this happen.