TWISTED SISTER‘s Dee Snider and TESTAMENT‘s Alex Skolnick have called for a tougher guns laws after back-to-back mass shootings in the United States left at least 29 dead and dozens injured in Texas and Ohio on August 3 and August 4.
As widely reported, In El Paso, a gunman opened fire as customers crowded into a Walmart during the back-to-school shopping season Saturday morning, leaving 20 people dead and another 26 wounded. Just hours after the El Paso attack, a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, left at least nine people dead and 26 wounded.
After the attacks, Snider took to his Twitter to write: “As a 2nd Amendment supporter & a concealed carrier I have to say something must be done with our gun laws. ‘Arming the general populace’ didn’t work in El Paso. That city has open carry, concealed carry & campus carry – it is gunned up. It did NOTHING to stop the mass shooting.”
Addressing one fan’s comment that he should “stick to [his] music” and that “problems run much deeper than guns and the ‘control,'” Skolnick wrote: “I don’t see how it affects your rights if the type of high powered weapon used today in El Paso — and so many other mass shootings that it’s becoming a regular occurrence — is treated like an airplane, requiring training, licensing, vetting and not purchased fairly easily in some states.
“You should have to earn that privilege for such weapons — not talking about more standard rifles & pistols with which you can still have your 2nd Amend. Right. But if someone has a manifesto to kill as many people you don’t like as possible (like the suspect in Texas does) and openly praises other mass killers like the New Zealand shooter (as the Texas suspect did on social media), then SORRY, he should not have the right to own one of these hi-powered weapons of war.
“No one’s coming for your 2nd Amendment right but it’s time to recognize our right not to get shot in this matter by this type of inidivividual with this type of weapon.”
Last month, Skolnick says that no American citizen is safe as long as the USA has “the weakest gun laws in the developed world.”
He made his comments in response to a tweet from a fan who was concerned about the musician’s well-being following news reports that three people were killed and at least 11 others were injured Sunday (July 28) in a shooting at an annual food festival in Northern California.
Skolnick tweeted: “I’m thousands of miles away, thanks. But as more mass shootings happen at schools, malls, movie theaters, concerts, nightclubs & elsewhere (we can add food festivals, sadly) here in the country with the weakest gun laws in the developed world & the most guns, none of us are safe.”
