Cooper Pushes Gun Control Measures Including…Medicaid Expansion?

RALEIGH – Gov. Roy Cooper has officially joined the rest of the Left in their calls for gun control. In a post on Medium Cooper outlines steps he believes the State should take to prevent school shootings, including raising the age requirement for purchasing rifles to 21 and expanding Medicaid. Seriously.

Leading his post off with a call to prevent children ever having to send messages to parent about being trapped in a school with a shooter, Cooper never once mentions hardening schools or allowing for some degree of armed protections among his list of steps to take.

Instead, he makes the nonsensical leap to suggest expanding Medicaid, long on his Leftist wish list, will help protect kids from future atrocities.

“I have long advocated for North Carolina to close our health care coverage gap by accepting federal funds that are offered to us to cover 500,000 more North Carolinians. This would benefit working families who currently earn just a little bit too much to be eligible for Medicaid but still can’t afford to pay for health care. It would connect hundreds of thousands of people with quality mental health care to make sure they don’t slip through the cracks.”

While mental health certainly warrants being a big part of the conversation, it’s pretty shameful that Cooper would use the grief and backlash over the murder of students and teachers as a vehicle for pushing Medicaid expansion.

Cooper also joins his comrades on the Left, and many Republicans (unfortunately), in calling for the age requirement for rifles to be raised to 21,  violating the rights of a whole class of adults despite the fact that only a small percentage of mass shooters have been under that age.

“Until the federal government takes action to discontinue the sale of assault weapons to civilians, North Carolina law should be updated to raise the legal age of sale of these weapons to age 21 and require anyone buying them — at a store, online, or at a gun show — to go through the same background check and permitting process as they would for a handgun. There’s no good reason for the current double standard.”

That first sentence is telling: Cooper is hoping the federal government outlaws the sale of “assault weapons” altogether. Short of that he wants to deny 18, 19, and 20 year olds their Second Amendment Rights. He also offer support for banning bump stocks.

While it is not surprising for Cooper to be in concert with the Left, it should be revealing to voters when they come to understand that if Cooper had his rathers he would ban your ability to own “assault weapons” and would rather score political points about Republicans’ laudable refusal to expand Medicaid than entertain eminently reasonable methods of literally protecting kids in schools.

In fact, he seems to avoid the prospect of allowing some armed personnel or employing armed security like the it’s the plague.

“We can also increase the number of school personnel who receive youth and adult mental health first aid training, which covers common mental health challenges that young people face and provides guidance for how to help them in both crisis and non-crisis situations.

The steps I’ve outlined here are meaningful, common sense changes that we can make to better protect our children and our communities. We can’t wait for Washington to act this time. The safety and security of our kids are on the line, and I urge the General Assembly to join me in taking decisive action to do right by them.”

The “safety and security of our kids are on the line” and Roy Cooper would rather equip personnel with mental health first aid training for crisis situations than to give kids a fighting chance to be defended in the event a murderer is actively shooting people.

Cooper does convey some points that enjoy broad bipartisan agreement, but his disregard for the Second Amendment, inability to even consider physically protecting children during an event via armed ‘good guys,’ and his willingness to push state healthcare expansion as part of his gun control narrative should be looked upon with derision by North Carolina citizens from Murphy to Manteo.