Mayor Mike Rawlings said today that he's behind President Obama's push for new restrictions aimed at curbing gun violence.
"We already say we can't own Stinger rockets. So the question is where does the line go? And the line being at semiautomatics is the right place," Rawlings told the Morning News' Todd Gilman today. "The proposals that the president has put on the table are solid, and I support them."
Rawlings, for those of you have missed the name-dropping of high-ranking administration officials on his Twitter account, is in D.C. right now for the U.S. Conference of Mayors' annual meeting.
Vice President Joe Biden addressed the conference yesterday, calling on attendees to help combat gun violence.
Rawlings was receptive.
"Which side am I on in this thing? I'm on the side of universal background checks and minimizing these magazines. This is a common sense approach," he told Gilman. "I'm most passionate about magazines. There's no reason for a 30-round magazine. What the right number is, I don't know."
Don't expect a push for additional local regulations; Rawlings said that his focus will be on supporting national proposals.
It shouldn't go unmentioned that Rawlings is a gun owner himself and knows many others. "Most of Dallas is major gun owners," he said, before adding somewhat ominously that "99 percent of my friends and my associates who own guns want to do it in a common-sense manner."
That other 1 percent? Let's just say you probably don't want to mess with them.
