Former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn Gives His Opinion On Gun Violence, Control

Retired Republican U.S. Senator Tom Coburn is a member of the News On 6 team.  He'll be along over the next year giving his views on the presidential election and opinions on a broad range of issues facing Oklahoma and the nation. 

One topic is gun violence and a call by many after San Bernardino for tighter gun control laws. 6 In The Morning anchor Rich Lenz asked Senator Coburn to weigh in.

"If somebody has a gun legally and they do something illegal with it, saying everybody else may potentially do that so therefore nobody can have a gun, that's not logical to me.

What we ought to do is prosecute those who violate the gun laws.

I think our emphasis is not right.  It's true there are a lot of guns in this country, it's also true that a lot of people's lives are saved everyday because people have guns.

So is the solution to stop the sale of all semi-automatic guns that are bought legally, or is the solution, one go back to core things, should we control who comes into this country , and do we vet them to make sure they are not radicalized.  

Should we be effective in terms of lone wolf in terms of funding the FBI correctly so they can find those people. 

Number three, should we emphasize family values and culture to where we start raising people that value life rather than don't value life.

Should we in fact re-establish incentives for marriage rather than incentives for unmarriage in terms of our social welfare programs.

The real problems are family. If you take radical Islam away, and everything else, you see all the rest of this, it's mental illness and family problems.

If you look at Colorado, mental illness. Virginia Tech, what your seeing is mental illness, but you are also see state's not complying with the law.

Another law on the books isn't going to fix, it and people who actually really want to do us harm, they're going to find a way to get a gun.

So what we ought to do is make it very painful for those that don't follow the law that we have today rather than write more laws."

The opinion of retired U.S. Senator Tom Coburn.  Get his thoughts on a wide range of issues, only on News On 6.