In a podcast interview, GOP Senate nominee Blake Masters was heard claiming gun violence in America is a Black issue, per The Daily Beast. To expand on the race issue, Masters also pushed that Democrats are not only enabling the violence but also “replacing” white voters with immigrants.
Masters, a Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona Senate, told “The Jeff Oravits Show” that Black people were the problem when it comes to gun violence.
“We do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence. It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly. And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that,” he said.
Here’s the thing, gang violence wasn’t making headlines. Instead, a white supremacist shooting and killing 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket sparked the national outrage against gun violence. However, Masters still insisted calls for gun control efforts were a violation of Second Amendment rights.
More from The Daily Beast:
After pinning gun violence on gangs and Black people—and saying, falsely, that Democratic administrations “don’t want to do anything” about gang shootings—the Stanford-educated libertarian went on to complain to Oravits that gun control efforts target “law-abiding people like you and me.”
“When they ban ‘ghost guns’ and pistol braces, that’s all about disarming law-abiding people, like you and me, that’s what it’s about,” Masters said, referencing government efforts to crack down on the surge in privately made, untraceable firearms. “They care that we can’t have guns to defend ourselves.”
Despite his cries for gun rights, if you want to control gun violence, you have to control the guns. Per the New York governor’s office, law enforcement have seized 4,000 guns this year, conducted 299 gun tracing investigations and seized illegal guns at a rate of 60 percent a month.
To target the Democrats again, Masters also claimed the party is “replacing” white voters with people of color and immigrants, per The Huffington Post. In the “Patriot Edition” podcast, he said the Democrats want to “change the demographics of our country” as if people of color aren’t slowly becoming the majority already.
The Huffington Post reported Arizona’s primary will be held August 2 and Masters will be going up against Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly.