Gun control hypocrisy at its best

[JamesSchacht]

123. 1,260,703 Americans died by firearms since 1968

And I just -- just on a personal note, on April 9, 1968, I was in Ebenezer Baptist Church when Martin Luther King's funeral -- a remarkable event. And two months later, I was working in California in Robert Kennedy's campaign when he was shot.

Martin Luther King was 39. Robert Kennedy was 42. That's -- 42 years after their being shot, 1,260,703 Americans died in firearms -- by firearms. In the total history of the United States in every war, in the Revolutionary, all the world's wars, 659,000 Americans have died in combat, twice as many in one-fifth the time.

And I think the president has the capacity and the standing at this point to make that case that we -- that this is not American exceptionalism, when we have five times -- four times as many people killed in this country as in the next 21 richest countries in the world in one year.

-- Mark Shields, PBS NewsHour, NewsHour.PBS.org, January 18, 2013, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june13/shieldsbrooks_01-18.html.