Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) left another leftist flummoxed by his biting wit in an exchange with an anti-gun doctor from Yale, sending his critics into a meltdown.
Kennedy bluntly called out the “word salad” coming from Dr. Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence after she tried to hit him with the number of gun deaths in his home state.
Ranney has followed the leftist mantra of demanding a “public health approach” to curbing gun violence in the nation, contending that the current “crisis” of high firearms death rates can be avoided if guns are treated as a public health issue.
“Let me ask you a question: why do you think Chicago has become America’s largest outdoor shooting range?” Kennedy asked the emergency physician who is currently with the Ivy League school in New Haven, Connecticut.
‘Do You Support Outlawing Fried Foods?’: Sen. John Kennedy Grill’s Dem Witness At Gun Violence Hearing
At today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator John Kennedy grilled a witness about gun crime.
Democrats are HYPOCRITES they never cease to amaze!
Watch… pic.twitter.com/fjzBwx85zV— (@Ann_Lilyflower) November 28, 2023
“Do you think it’s because of Chicago’s citizens who have no criminal record but have a gun in their home for protection…Or do you think it’s because of a finite group of criminals who have rap sheets as long as King Kong’s arm?” he added.
“So Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri actually have higher firearm death rates obviously, there’s…,” Ranney began only to be interrupted by Kennedy who was looking for an answer to his question.
“So I don’t live in Chicago. It’s not my primary area of research,” the doctor replied.
“You don’t have an opinion on that?” the senator wondered.
“I think there’s easy access to firearms combined with environmental conditions and a lack of great education,” Ranney began her non-answer. “There have actually been studies showing that when you use green vacant lots and repair abandoned buildings in urban neighborhoods, you see decreases in gunshots and violence as well as in stress and depression in the neighborhoods around them.”
Kennedy dropped the truth bomb.
“No disrespect, doc, but that sounds a lot like a word salad to me,” he remarked.
Kennedy went on to give the doctor examples of progressive district attorneys who have intentionally not prosecuted gun crimes in Democrat cities, asking her opinion on several cases to which Ranney repeated that she was not a lawyer and had “no opinion.
“You equated gun death to heart disease in your opening statement,” Kenndy followed up. “Which is a greater public health problem?”
When Ranney confirmed that there are more deaths due to heart disease than guns in the nation, the senator asked, “Do you support outlawing fried foods?”
“Uh, I’m sorry. How does that relate to…,” a confused Ranney responded. “Again, I have not written or said I support outlawing…”
“But you’re a physician, right?” Kennedy shot back.
The left-wing media could hardly contain themselves, with MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski outraged over Kennedy, whom she called out as “racist, elitist, condescending, and ill-informed.” Her husband and co-host Joe Scarborough slammed Kennedy for “insulting a woman” in a tweet reacting to the video clip and was quickly schooled on the facts.
State-level murder rates are highly misleading. As my @Heritage colleagues and I explained in our Blue City Murder Problem paper, crime is a localized phenomenon.https://t.co/csU65jpqpg
And guess what? Remove the blue cities from the red states…and the murder rates fall. https://t.co/ril5jqYniX
— Zack Smith (@tzsmith) November 29, 2023
John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, wanted to know “why do you pick just a couple of states to compare?”
“Is that how public health researchers do research? Why don’t you look at local crime rates where policing policies are determined and where DAs and judges are almost always selected?” he asked on X.
.@meganranney and @therecount, why do you pick just a couple of states to compare? Is that how #publichealth researchers do research? Why don’t you look local crime rates where policing policies are determined and where DAs and judges are almost always selected?
— John R Lott Jr. (@JohnRLottJr) November 28, 2023
“Anybody knows that law enforcement is overwhelmingly a local issue,” Lott told Fox News Digital. “How much money you spend on police, what the police policies are going to be are decided locally. District attorneys are almost always elected locally. Judges are almost always elected locally. Who gets arrested, who gets charged, how you prosecute the cases and the judges that makes the decisions on sentencing are all local decisions.”
“That’s what public health officials do all the time. They focus on just firearm deaths,” Lott added, calling out Ranney for using the term “firearm death rates.”
“To me, it’s just sloppy statistical work by these public health people,” he asserted, adding that it’s “pretty clear that people like Megan want to go and ban gun ownership.”
“She’s supposed to be an academic, and I just think it shows political bias to selectively pick a couple of states,” he said.
Ranney responded in a statement to Fox News Digital, saying, “Mississippi, Louisiana and New Mexico are the states with the highest death rates; I mentioned Missouri (which is also top 10) simply because I knew St Louis’ homicide rates are second only to New Orleans.”
“I absolutely think there is value at looking at death and injury data at all levels, and as I mentioned in my testimony, Americans deserve access to high-quality data on injuries of all kinds,” Ranney said. “I am a public health professional, not a criminologist, so I think of data in terms of injury.”
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida. Powers also contributes to BizPac Review.
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