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Mike Huckabee: Debate Mental Health, Not Guns
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, now seeking the Republican presidential nomination, says a concealed handgun carried by a faculty member or student at Virginia Tech might have reduced the toll from Monday's shooting spree by a student. "If somebody had been able to stop the shooter before he was able to kill that many people, there may not have been that many," Huckabee said Thursday in an interview with University of Arkansas at Little Rock radio station KUAR. Cho Seung-Hui, 23, killed 32 people Monday on the Virginia Tech campus before taking his own life. Huckabee was interviewed by telephone from New Hampshire, where he is campaigning.
Story Continues Below A long-time hunter, Huckabee has spoken publicly before about his support for concealed-weapon permits - and his own license to carry. "I was the first governor in America to have a concealed-carry permit, so don't mess with me," he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in March. Last year, he told an audience in South Carolina that he would support a national "right to carry" bill that would require states to recognize concealed-weapons permits issued by other states. Huckabee's predecessor as Arkansas governor, Jim Guy Tucker, signed legislation in 1995 that allowed residents of the state to obtain concealed-weapons permits after taking a required course. Though he's a hunter, he said in that appearance at Lexington, S.C., that the Second Amendment is not about hunting. "It's about protecting yourself, your families," and making sure government never tries to overrun its people, he said. But he said Thursday that a renewed debate over gun control is not the proper reaction to the Virginia college shooting. He says the nation instead should begin a discussion of mental health, and how an obviously sick young man managed to slip through the cracks.
© 2007 Associated Press.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
2008 Presidential Race Inside Cover Stories
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