GOP congressman appears to compare mass shootings to getting stuck on DC metro

A Republican congressman who last year joined with his colleagues in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election is now hitting Democrats for supposedly politicising the tragedy of back-to-back mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York.

In an inteview with Newsmax’s National Report on Monday, Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma appeared to try to minimise the legitimate concerns about gun violence in America and compared those fears to his own concerns about riding the DC Metro, famous for its maintenance issues, after he was “stuck” one time on a train.

“You know, I don’t get on the Metro in DC because I don’t like it, I kind of somewhat fear it because I got stuck on it once. That doesn’t mean I want to ban it,” he explained.

The Independent has reached out to the congressman’s office for further context about his issues with Washington DC’s Metrorail system, including regarding whether he was in any personal danger during the incident.

Mr Mullin’s comments come after nearly two dozen elementary schoolers and their teachers were massacred at a school in Texas, Oklahoma’s neighbor to the south. The congressman portrayed calls by activists to ban assault weapons or place restrictions on ownership, such as a higher age limit, as efforts to ban the Second Amendment entirely. He suggested that those calls were coming from people who “fear” what they don’t understand, apparentely referring to firearms and gun ownership.

The congressman is among a number of far-right House and Senate members who have out of hand rejected calls to restrict gun ownership after the 18-year-old suspect in Uvalde apparently used an AR-15-styled DDM4 Rifle to carry out the attack.

Firearms kill thousands of people in the US every year; in 2020, the total number of Americans killed through intentional or accidental use of firearms totaled nearly 20,000, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

The DC Metro, by comparison, has not seen a fatal crash since 2009 and last saw a fatal incident in 2015 when a car stopped at the L’Enfant Plaza station filled with smoke, causing dozens of injuries and one death.

Oklahoma, where Mr Mullin has been a congressman since 2013, notably does not have any underground rail systems in its major cities of Tulsa or Oklahoma City.