NBC "Meet the Press" - Transcript

Interview

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GREGORY: And Congresswoman, you-- you have experienced something like this, the grief that comes with it, the shock that comes with it, and the search to do something productive afterward.

REP. CAROLYN MCCARTHY (D-NY): Well, and it is, you know, I get up really early in the morning. The first thing I put on is TV. And I saw all the news. It just brings you back to a place most victims don't want to go to, but incidents like this and knowing what the families are going to be going through, not only today and tomorrow, but the weeks down the road. But, you know, when-- when Bill talks about the lone gunman, he's absolutely right. But there's one thing that they all have in common, and they had a gun with large magazines.
GREGORY: Right.

REP. MCCARTHY: So they could take down as many people. The police responded in 90 seconds. And yet he was able to take down 70 people.

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REP. MCCARTHY: But David, that argument goes back even to 1993 when the NRA basically said if someone else had been on the train, so many people wouldn't have been killed. Believe me, I've talked to an awful lot of police officers, commissioners of police, they said it's the worst scenario you can possibly think of. Can you imagine in that theater, smoke, it's dark and everybody starts shooting? I think the massacre would have been a lot worse.

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REP. MCCARTHY: And can I say something, you know, as horrible as this tragedy was and is, you have to remember how many people are killed every single day…

MR. BRATTON: 55.

REP. MCCARTHY: …by getting illegal guns. And so when people who say, and the NRA will say that to me also, "Oh, she's going to try and talk about gun control, gun safety issues." I do it because this happens every single day.
GREGORY: Right. But look-- but look, you're a politician now. And the political debate seems to be frozen on the issue of guns. Mayor Bloomberg was trying to, you know, get people to focus again. Here was the headline after Congresswoman Giffords--one of your own colleagues who was shot. And the-- the headline in the Arizona Daily Star, President Obama saying we must seek agreement on gun reforms. His own advisors here saying, yes, we're going to get that-- that conversation started again. There's been nothing, even after your own colleague was shot. I mean, for Democrats, it seems they don't want to-- they really don't want to take on this issue.

REP. MCCARTHY: I personally think that it was a fallacy after-- when President Clinton was able to pass the Assault Weapons Bill. Everybody kind of forgets about that time in history. We also raised taxes so there was a lot of things going on. I personally don't think that members that lost that following year actually lost because of the gun issue. Myself and several other people were elected the following year on the gun issue. So I think that there's a lot of myths out there as far as that goes. And I always look at it this way, no one from the NRA is ever going to vote for me and they're just not. They might even come after me on other issues. But the thing of it is, as a politician, a lot of politicians know it's the right thing to try to fight for something to save lives. They don't have the spine anymore. They pander to who's giving them money.

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REP. MCCARTHY: I absolutely agree. You know, since I've been in Congress, I've seen over the last several years the deterioration of working with each other. It's-- which is really a shame, because many of us, Republican and Democrat, do work together. We actually get legislation passed working together. We still go by the old way of compromise. But when you listen to the words of some-- some of my colleagues that are inflammatory, I mean it's something that goes out there and people will say, well, look at these politicians. I mean just in the last past week, a few of my colleagues came out with statements on other people, which were absolutely not true.

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