Last week, U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Fairhope), a candidate for U.S. Senate, hosted a town hall meeting at Hoover Tactical, a gun dealer located in Hoover.
During that event, Byrne fielded a question from AL(dot)com reporter Abbey Crain, who suggested there was something untoward in holding an event at a gun dealer’s facility in the wake of the El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio shootings.
On Wednesday, Byrne responded to that critique during an interview on Huntsville radio’s WVNN and asked how it might look if he had scrapped his plans for the town hall event at that venue.
Congressmen Bradley Byrne opened his town hall meeting at Hoover Tactical Firearms with a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.https://t.co/rZNACCrdky
— Abbey Crain (@AbbeyCrain) August 7, 2019
“You don’t find people making these shootings going to places like Hoover Tactical,” Byrne said. “Plus, what sort of message would it send that I scheduled a town hall there and then because of the shooting, I’m going to say, ‘No, no Hoover Tactical – there’s something wrong with you and other gun dealers like you? I’m not going to support you or being anywhere near you.’ I met the people that run that business. They seem like really good people.”
“Everything I hear about them – they run a very good, very professional shop,” he continued. “It looked like high-quality stuff to me. It was never much of a question on our end. We were going to go forward with it at that venue. And as you saw, it was excellent town hall. We got great questions, got into some substantive and meaty issues. We just had one reporter there that wanted to go off on that one issue and I don’t think it had much of an impact on the other people in the room that day.”
The Baldwin County Republican addressed the push to change gun laws and regulations, which he said but the blame on people that were not responsible for the actual problem.
“We’ve got a problem with the breakdown of American society and we’re trying to blame the effects of that breakdown on people that aren’t responsible for it,” he added. “But it is not unusual with the far left. They do that. And so, the question is are the rest of us going to succumb to that. And I just made up my mind that I’m not going to. I know where I stand on that issue. I’m not going to change my mind on it. And I’m not going to allow other people to try to villainize or try to taint the good people like the folks that own that business. I’m going to continue to stand with them because they’re doing nothing wrong and they have a right to be doing what they’re doing.”
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University, the editor of Breitbart TV and host of “The Jeff Poor Show” from 2-5 p.m. on WVNN in Huntsville.
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