Rep. Trey Gowdy stops by the Greenville County Republican Party election results watching party at Caesars on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. / Heidi Heilbrunn/Staff
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As Vice President Joe Biden prepares to lead a national effort to find “concrete proposals” to curb gun violence, U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy said sufficient guns laws are in place to protect a community's safety and security.
“We have gun control,” Gowdy told GreenvilleOnline.com on Wednesday. “There are controls on who can have guns. There are controls on what types of guns they can have and there are controls over where you can have guns.”
But he offered one caveat: “I don’t think anyone would disagree that people who are mentally ill should not have access to guns, anymore than we would argue they should have access to knives or hammers.”
In the wake of the mass school shooting in Connecticut that killed 20 children, Gowdy called for “thoughtful, apolitical analysis of all the components that go into something as horrific as what happened in Newtown.”
“When I say ‘all components,’ you have a shooter, which implicates mental health,” Gowdy said. “It implicates, in part, the environment, the culture in which we live. It’s everything from the music that people listen to, to what passes for entertainment, to the ability to dehumanize people in video games and just hit the restart button.”
Gowdy, a Spartanburg Republican elected this year to his second term in the House, is a former prosecutor whose caseload including many weapons offenses.
In September, he was confronted by a woman who allegedly pointed a gun at him as he waited in a Spartanburg church parking lot to pick up his daughter.
And he is married to a kindergarten school teacher, giving him multiple angles of insight into potential gun violence.
“There’s not a weapons ban that’s ever been proposed that would have prevented what happened outside my church,” Gowdy said.
A 52-year-old Atlanta woman was arrested and charged with allegedly pointing the gun at Gowdy. Authorities said it was an apparent random act and not a targeted attack on the congressman.
In Washington, President Barack Obama asked that a team led by Biden offer “concrete proposals” to curb gun violence no later than January, in the aftermath of the horrific massacre at the Connecticut elementary school.
Obama says after he receives recommendations from Biden’s group, he will push legislation “without delay.” The president is urging Congress to hold votes on the bill.
Obama says the issue is complex but, “we have a deep obligation — all of us — to try.”
Biden, a longtime gun control advocate, will lead a team that will include members of Obama’s administration and outside groups.
The move comes after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. Twenty children and six adults were killed at the school by a gunman wielding a semi-automatic rifle.
The mass shooting last week has refocused much of the country on the issue of gun control, with some in Congress calling for measures to toughen the nation’s laws.
But others cite the right under the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms, and it remained unclear what, if any, new weapons restrictions would result.
Gun owners represent a strong lobby in South Carolina, and there have been few new signs of support for any proposed limits.
Gowdy, representing South Carolina’s 4th Congressional District, worked for six years as a federal prosecutor. He prosecuted a range of federal crimes including narcotics trafficking rings, bank robberies, child pornography cases, and the murder of a federal witness.
As 7th Circuit Solicitor, Gowdy led an office of 25 attorneys and 65 employees.
He said federal gun law stipulates that people who have been adjudicated “mentally defective” can’t possess any type firearm or ammunition.
“Does that phrase mean that you have to be adjudicated in a court of law?” Gowdy asked. “Does that phrase mean that if a psychiatrist or psychologist passes judgment on you?”
“In my 16 years as a prosecutor, I sat and rode out the different methods by which one human being has killed either one or two other human beings,” he said. “And it runs the gamut. Sure, there are rifles and shotguns and handguns and there’s rope and there are hammers and there are concrete blocks and there are hands.”
Said Gowdy: “The question to me, at the forefront, isn’t so much the method by which someone commits an unspeakable act of depravity against children. We would feel no better if he had used a car bomb or if he had used a knife.”
A review of the nation’s weapons laws must include a look “at the way we handle mental illness in this culture and we have to look at whether or not there’s a larger societal implication from this culture of violence and dehumanizing life,” Gowdy said.
If there is interest in those as well, “sign me up,” Gowdy said.
The challenge is to find a way to keep weapons from people who are mentally ill “consistent with the Second Amendment,” he said.
“I’m convinced that there is,” Gowdy said.
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