GOP Rep. calls House sit-in a `political stunt'

Iowa U.S. Rep. Steve King joined Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” program yesterday, where he weighed in on the Democratic gun control sit-in and the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub shooting.

The Republican lawmaker blasted the Democrats’ nearly 26-hour demonstration on the floor of the House of Representatives as a carefully coordinated political stunt that ultimately failed to get Republicans to vote on two controversial gun control bills.

“I think they just embraced the idea that (the shooting) was about guns and if they could somehow outlaw guns, this wouldn’t happen again,” King said. “I think that it’s a tunnel vision that ends up in a dead end.”

King went on to say that stricter gun laws are not going to prevent terrorists from carrying out mass shootings like the one in Orlando, Fla., earlier this month that left 49 people dead and 53 wounded.

He also said the FBI is partly to blame for not keeping the gunman, Omar Mateen, under investigation — which likely would have stopped him from purchasing the SIG Sauer semi-automatic rifle he used during the massacre.

“If they’d had kept him under investigation they likely could have kept him from at least getting a gun down the path that he used,” King said. “Just think, if he had been fully under investigation, they perhaps could have put a flag out on him ... instead they decided that he was safe.”

King said one of the biggest deterrents facing law enforcement officials who are hoping to identify homegrown Islamic terrorists before they strike is the fear of being labeled an “Islamophobe or a bigot.”

“I think that if we’re going to outlaw anything, we should outlaw this idea of political correctness,” King said, adding, “You may want to put a marker on a man (like Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan) but if you’re afraid you’ll be accused of being a racist or a bigot or an Islamophobe then you don’t. And we heard the same narrative out of San Bernardino — an individual that watched the comings and goings of the activity out of the house said, ‘I didn’t want to be labeled a bigot so I just decided to let it go.’”

President Obama will have to change his approach if he wants to prevent further attacks, King said.

“(Obama) does not want to identify the problem, radical Islamic jihad,” King said. “He doesn’t want to address it in that fashion, he wants to address it as a law enforcement fashion. That essentially means if you can’t get there first, then you’re going to be in the business of cleaning up the mess.”