MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript: "Six officers injured in standoff with Philly shooter."
Interview
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MADDOW: Joining us now for the interview is Senator Cory Booker, candidate, of course, for the Democratic nomination for president. He`s the senator from the great state of New Jersey. Sir, it`s great to have you here. Thanks for coming by. I`m really glad you`re able to come in.
SEN. CORY BOOKER (D-NJ), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: It`s great to be here. Thank you for having me as always. Thank you.
MADDOW: I had a whole bunch of things that I wanted to, like, set up and talk to you about and had all this elaborate storytelling. Because you are here, I actually want to ask you about this breaking news that we are covering, this story in Philadelphia. It appears to be an ongoing standoff. This has been going on for hours and hours. More than five hours at this point. Six police officers have been shot. It appears they all have non-life-threatening wounds. But I just want to ask your reaction to this. You`ve been talking so much about gun violence and criminal justice.
BOOKER: Well, what`s interesting as a guy who actually ran a police department, to see my officers put themselves in the line of fire quite literally, have situations like this where you go into a house, you don`t know what`s going on inside. I`ve seen some of the most courageous officers when I was mayor run into buildings where they have no situational awareness, encounter weapons that have no business being on our streets in the hands of people who would never have been able to get them if we had the most common sense background checks. So, often, the voices you hear calling for the kind of gun safety that I put in sort of my very bold plan are police officers wanting it to happen, because their lives are getting increasingly dangerous. And we`re seeing -- our prayers should go out to these officers who are recovering, and the standoff is still ongoing.
MADDOW: Uh-huh.
BOOKER: But, unfortunately, in our cities all across America, we see officers in situations of danger they should not be in and would not be in if we were a nation that had sensible gun safety laws.
MADDOW: I feel like in gun reform discussions past, like I`m old enough to remember the discussions around the first assault weapons ban. I`m also old enough to remember the discussion about cop-killing bullets, right, the hollow-point bullets, other sorts of, you know, bullets designed to pierce body armor. And it felt like such an important part of that discussion, sort of part of the way that argument in the political sphere educated the public about these weapons was when law enforcement spoke out and said, listen, whatever you think about the Second Amendment, practically what`s going on here, we`re being outgunned and we need some reasonable restrictions on what civilians have access to so that we can be the monopolist of force in our society. That`s part of our constitutional inheritance. I don`t feel like I hear those voices from law enforcement right now in the gun reform debate.
BOOKER: Well, I`m hoping you`re going to increasingly see voices from all over our society, because the insanity of this all is just -- especially with the massive rise in white supremacist attacks now. But, again, as a guy who was a mayor in a city that had too many shootings, we were able to lower it, but still lowering, still too many, what I saw which give me chills when we had -- got tips to do gun raids and found these gun storehouses where, again, these are all illegal weapons that flow into communities like my city and many others. And you just look at these stashes of weapons and you wonder how could we have a society where this is so easy for criminals intent on doing dangerous things can so easily get weapons that do not belong in -- they only belong in theaters of war, frankly. That puts officers at risk, the community members. And the thing I see is that people having these weapons just shooting them indiscriminately, this is where you see in communities like mine and other cities, it`s bystanders, people showing you bullet holes in their windows. And it creates an environment so crippled by fear and trauma that on Fourth of July in communities like mine across this country, you have people who hear fireworks and parents will tell you their children dive for cover. They cower. They hide. We created such a culture of fear that`s now penetrating all types of communities where we say the best we can do to our children now when they go to school in September is we can`t protect you, so we`re going to teach you how to duck for cover, shelter in place and the more. That is a society that has surrendered basic freedoms -- freedom from violence, freedom from gunfire, freedom to live without this kind of constant cortisol in the back of your brain being released that undermines our quality of life. We are losing our wellbeing as a nation because so many of these guns now are on our streets, so easily gotten by people who intent to do massive amounts of harm.
MADDOW: Because there are so many out there already -- I mean, I`m thinking about it tonight in Philly. We don`t know what kind of arsenal this gunman has, but we know he`s been able to hold off a police department for five hours and shoot six cops along the way. I mean, who knows --
BOOKER: And you say that so casually.
MADDOW: I mean --
BOOKER: I don`t think people understand --
MADDOW: Yes.
BOOKER: -- what that means.
MADDOW: Yes.
BOOKER: And that there are people right now, we see this now, we see the horrible results like we saw in El Paso, but we also hear stories, since El Paso, of people intervening to stop people plotting these kind of attacks. This is why we`ve released -- I hope people will go to corybooker.com -- a far more comprehensive way to stop what has been -- the majority of our terrorist attacks since 9/11 have been white-wing extremist groups, a majority of them have been white supremacist groups. We have a massive problem because of these guns on our streets that enable people who want to do sinister things and whether they`re people in inner-city communities that make so many of us -- I`ve had shootings on my block. As the only senator who lives in a low-income inner-city community where, unfortunately, these guns are often too often easily obtained by people who have no right to buy them in the first place. People like me who live in communities where we see shootings or live now in nation where we`re afraid to go to the mall, to a concert, to our house of worship. So, there has to be an urgency to deal with this, and the fact that we`re saying (ph) things, I mean, God, we used to be a nation where people died, four girls in a church in Birmingham, pushed us to change laws.
MADDOW: Uh-huh.
BOOKER: As King said, you can`t legislate people to love me but I can legislate them to stop lynching me. Women here in this city throwing themselves out the window at the shirtwaist factory fire, we changed laws. We used to have this common empathy that we can do what`s necessary to give us the freedom from these types of fears. But now, we see a moral impotency from too many leaders that are preventing common sense things from happening and creating a culture now where no other developed nation talks the way we do --
MADDOW: Uh-huh.
BOOKER: -- about the common place of what we`re seeing today, putting our law enforcement at risk, our children at risk, our families, our neighborhoods, our communities. This must stop. And that`s why I`m demanding really everyone in this Democratic Party, don`t let the corporate gun lobby frame this debate. Let`s us now frame what really is common sense. And that`s why I hope people will find out more about my plan at corybooker.com.
MADDOW: I have more to ask you about that in just a moment if you can stay with us.
BOOKER: Please, yes.
MADDOW: Senator Cory Booker is our guest. We`ll be right back with him after this.
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MADDOW: Back with us now is Cory Booker. He`s the Democratic senator from the state of New Jersey. He`s also a leading Democratic presidential candidate this year. Sir, thank you for sticking with us.
BOOKER: Thank you for having me.
MADDOW: You still do have your day job in the Senate while you`re pursuing this presidential campaign. And from that perspective, I wanted to ask you -- we were just talking about leadership on guns and the national feeling about domestic terrorism, white nationalism, the threat of those sorts of organized hate movements, but also the weaponry that`s out there in the world. Do you feel like there`s anything that`s going to pass through the Senate? I mean, I know that the house can pass not only background checks but more with the Democratic control. Can anything pass the Senate? Will anything?
BOOKER: So I`ll never limit the realm of possibilities, as a prisoner of hope. But let`s be clear, the same actors on the stage right now have denied time and time again what majority of their own constituents want, what the majorities of the Republican Party wants. There`s overwhelming agreement among gun owners to say you should not live in a country where someone who is guilty of spousal abuse can then go out and buy a weapon, who`s on the terrorist no-fly list can then go out and buy a weapon. We have such a porous system right now, but, again, nothing has changed. Kids shot under desks. Kids -- people shot in a night club. Nothing has changed. But my hope is, is that we see this rising outrage in this country that begins to move the needles. But I`m telling you, I think this 2020 election, and people underestimate it, this is going to be one of the issues. And I think it`s going to see a lot of people backed by the corporate gun lobby and the NRA booted out of office, will be held accountable. We saw that in the 20 18 elections where you had openly people backed by Moms Demand Action going up against NRA-backed candidates, and in almost all the cases, losing. So, I think that this is a moment, a moral moment in our country.
MADDOW: Uh-huh.
BOOKER: And the moral bankruptcy of those people who are representing corporate gun lobbies and not common sense, their days are coming to the end. If I have my way, we`re going to bring a fight to the NRA over the next months and years like they`ve never seen before, with the will and the force -- not in the partisan nature -- but the will and the force of American people who want freedom again -- freedom from fear, freedom from this kind of level of carnage.
MADDOW: I mean, I don`t mean to get too tactical or ask you to be a pundit here, but if that`s your analysis about the politics of this heading into 2020, it sounds to me like the differences of opinion among the Democratic candidates about what exactly is possible, or what`s the right exact policy to aim at in gun reform, might be less important when it comes to the general election than just the idea that the American public knows that the Democratic Party, if you elect a Democratic president, a Democratic Congress, you are going to get meaningful gun reform. And if you keep the Republican Party in power, you`re not. I mean, obviously, you candidates, the 20 of you who are all running right now sort of fighting amongst yourselves as to who has the best and most progressive policies. Are those fine points going to make the difference?
BOOKER: Well, I love what your question is because I try to remind them on the last debate stage -- hey, we have common cause here.
MADDOW: Yes.
BOOKER: Differences don`t matter as much. But for me, I just want to be very blunt. I`ve lived this nightmare. I have -- young kid, Shahid Smith, we should keep saying people`s names, watched him grow up, shot with an assault rifle, killed on the top of my block. I`ve seen shrines in my neighborhood to kids that are born, sat next to it a shooting victim trying in vain to stop him from bleeding to death. The kind of fight I`m going to bring, because this is very personal to me, I`ve seen the death and carnage up close and personal. It goes on every day in America. I know our mass shootings rightfully capture a lot of attention. But every day, 100 people are dying by gun violence. The majority of gun violence victims in America are black men. This is something I`ve been witnessing for 20 years living in inner city. I will bring a fight to this fight like the NRA and the corporate elite has never seen with a personal passion to solve this crisis once and for all. I know we are -- Democrats all agree, but we have to understand change does not just happen. It`s not inevitable. It must be fought for and must be focused on. In the same way they`re one-issue supporters, NRA corporate gun lobby, we must make sure that this is a preeminent issue in the cause of our country, because if governments are formed for the common defense, we`ve lost more people in these last 50 years from gun violence than we lost in every war combined, from the Revolutionary War unto present. That is unacceptable. We must change it.
MADDOW: Senator Cory Booker, Democrat candidate for president in 2020 -- sir, it`s really good to have you in person.
BOOKER: Thank you.
MADDOW: Thanks. Come back soon.
BOOKER: So good to be here. Thank you.
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