On Monday's Charlie Rose show David Remnick exploited the Boston Marathon bombing to push for more gun control as he told the PBS host: "We see yet another act which might have been a Hell of a lot more difficult to pull off with effective gun control." In a discussion about the Tsarnaevs terrorist plot the editor of The New Yorker and former Washington Post reporter, pondered where they got their "pistols from?" and said that while he didn't "want to politicize" the tragedy proceeded to do just that, as he complained: "Within a week's time a very, very, very weak gun control bill gets defeated."
The following exchange was aired on the April 22 edition of PBS's Charlie Rose show:
CHARLIE ROSE: Any evidence of any training anywhere?
DAVID REMNICK, EDITOR, THE NEW YORKER: Well, it was said that the family's father had some, had given them some military training but I don't see any evidence of this yet and that might have been anecdotal and he taught them how to shoot a gun or something like that. I think a domestic question has to be asked is how do kids like that get guns?
ROSE: Yeah, I've always wondered that. What did they do to get? I mean they had-
REMNICK: They build this...
ROSE: -an arsenal of guns and weapons. Pipe bombs.
REMNICK: These bombs are so crude.
ROSE: Yeah.
REMNICK: Thank God, they're so crude. That the poor eight-year-old boy who was killed by this bomb, there were people right next to him that were barely harmed at all. A much more effective bomb by, as it were, a pro -- and thank God they, they weren't or didn't seem to be – would have had a much more effective bomb as you see all the time in Baghdad-
ROSE: What did they find?
REMNICK: -or Kabul or wherever. Where are they getting side arms from? Where are they getting, where are they getting pistols from? It's not, to me, and I don't want to politicize an act of terrorism, but it's, it is worth remarking upon, worth remarking upon, in that within a week's time a very, very, very weak gun control bill gets defeated, in effect defeated in the Senate, we see yet another act which might have been a Hell of a lot more difficult to pull off with effective gun control. Not for nothing.
-- Geoffrey Dickens is the Deputy Research Director at the Media Research Center. Click here [1] to follow Geoffrey Dickens on Twitter.