Hayes Compares Need for Gun Control to ‘Scale of the Response’ to the Ebola Outbreak

MSNBC’s Hayes Compares Need for Gun Control to ‘Scale of the Response’ to the Ebola Outbreak (NewsBusters)

On the Thursday edition of MSNBC’s All In, liberal host Chris Hayes trumpeted the need for gun control measures after the deadly community college shooting in Roseburg, Oregon by comparing the impediment to enact such policies to the “scale of the response” the world deployed during the 2014 outbreak of the Ebola virus. 

Speaking with Hayes, Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen (Md.) hyped that the “time for action is way overdue” because: “If this were a disease, if this were a virus that was killing tens of thousands of Americans, we would have the scientists at the National Institutes of Health, we would have the folks across the country at the CDC, we would have all hands on deck.”

Expanding upon Van Hollen’s point, Hayes reminded viewers that the U.S. “one year ago today had the first American who got Ebola” and then asked everyone to recall “scale of the response, of the things that were motivated to make sure that disease did not spread, the absolute terror that people would be stalked by Ebola, and compare that to the way we shrug off gun violence.”

At the top of the show, Hayes played President Barack Obama’s full comments on the tragedy from just over an hour and a half beforehand that he gushed was “a blistering response to today's events, one that may be remembered as one of the most powerful and angry speeches of his presidency.”