Return to Transcripts main page
CNN Newsroom
More Funerals in Newtown; Remebering the Attack on the Jewish Community Center in 1999; Piers Morgan to Host Town Hall Meeting on Guns
Aired December 19, 2012 - 15:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN: More funerals today where all eyes are focused on a child-size casket. People, families, loved ones paying tribute to these three students killed in that massacre Friday morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School, paying tribute to the little ones as well as one of their favorite teachers, 27-year-old Vicki Soto.
A police honor guard saluted the casket of this young teacher who died shielding her students -- she was a hero -- from that gunfire.
Also, Caroline Previdi, she was six-years-old. A Facebook page dedicated to her has more than 5,400 "Likes" since her death.
Daniel Barden, seven-years-old, he was a drummer in a band he formed with his brother and his sister.
Also today, six-year-old Charlotte Bacon was described as a bundle of energy under her bright red curls.
Perhaps one of the most tragic aspects to the killings in Connecticut, not first time. This is not the first time little children have seen bullets fly and escaped murder themselves.
Let me take you back to 1999. A white supremacist randomly opened fire at a Jewish community center in Los Angeles. You remember this?
Five people were hit, including three children who were just five- and six-years-old.
Senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen spoke with two of them.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I saw some of the bullets going past the hall.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We heard yelling and put your hands up, don't shoot. We heard lots of scary stuff.
ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: These innocent eyes have witnessed unspeakable horrors.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everybody was like crying.
COHEN: Images that could haunt them forever.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She walked past the body. She saw the principal. She saw the blood.
COHEN: Physically, they escaped, but how will these young survivors do mentally?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A very serious situation at the North Valley Jewish Community Center ...
COHEN: Ben Kadish and Josh Stepakoff know what it's like to face the nightmare.
Thirteen years ago, the boys were at summer camp in Los Angeles when a gunman stormed in and shot them. Ben was five.
What do you remember happening around you?
BEN KADISH, SURVIVED MASS SHOOTING AT AGE OF FIVE: Screaming, tons of screaming.
COHEN: Josh was six.
JOSH STEPAKOFF, SURVIVED MASS SHOOTING AT AGE OF SIX: He came in and he shot all the way around and the next thing I remember I was just getting up and running as fast as I could that way.
COHEN: The boys survived, but were never the same emotionally.
STEPAKOFF: I didn't live a normal childhood. In no means did I have a normal childhood.
COHEN: The shooter, Buford Furrow, had robbed them of their security.
When you were dropped off at school, you wondered am I safe?
KADISH: Yes.
COHEN: For how long?
KADISH: Probably through middle school.
STEPAKOFF: If we heard helicopters, sirens, loud noises, anything that would startle me, the house was on lockdown.
COHEN: So you would go around and lock doors?
STEPAKOFF: I locked every door. I locked every window.
COHEN: Why did you lock every door and window?
STEPAKOFF: That was the closest thing I could feel to safe.
COHEN: Now 19, these two young men are among the few people who've experienced what the Connecticut children have experienced. STEPAKOFF: The pictures of the kids being taken out and standing in this line, I could accidentally mistake the pictures from when I got shot.
COHEN: They worry for the Newtown children.
KADISH: I think they're going to feel, you know, afraid of the dark, afraid of loud noises.
COHEN: What advice would you give to these parents in Connecticut?
STEPAKOFF: Listen to your kids, you know? They're a lot smarter than we take them for and, so, you really have to just listen to them and be understanding to them and know that there will be times when they really do want to talk about it and there will be times when they don't.
And if they don't want to talk about it, don't push them.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BALDWIN: Wow. How about that for some advice?
Senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen, you know, I have been hoping that -- you know, when I think back to my own first grade, I don't really remember much. So, I've been hoping that these kids who survived wouldn't either.
But according to Josh and Ben, they still struggle today.
COHEN: They still struggle today. They do. They said they have their moments.
And, so, when it came time last year or the year before to decide where to go to college, they stayed local because they said, when we have a moment, we want to be five minutes from home. We don't want to be a plane ride away from home.
So, it still affects them.
BALDWIN: They were talking about some advice. Listen to your parents, what advice do they have to parents in Newtown?
COHEN: Right. To the parents in Newtown, they say, listen to your child. Your child may feel like talking, may not feel like talking.
One of the -- I asked Ben, what was most helpful thing your parents did? And he said my parents reminded me that, in addition to this being terrible, that it made me stronger, that if I could get through this, I was a strong person.
And he said like his personal mantra has become "Ben Kadish can do anything." And he remembers that all the time.
BALDWIN: It's incredible. Thank you for getting their story, sharing their stories, 13 years later. Appreciate it. Now this. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PIERS MORGAN, HOST, "PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT": I know why sales of these weapons have been soaring in the last few days. It's down to idiots like you. Mr. Pratt, thank you for joining me.
When we come back ...
LARRY PRATT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GUN OWNERS OF AMERICA: Thank you for your high-level argument, Mr. Morgan. It's really very good.
MORGAN: You know what? You wouldn't understand the meaning of the phrase high-level argument.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: Oh, Piers Morgan, he is passionate about gun control and tonight he's holding a town hall live on CNN.
What voices will we hear? What should we expect? Here he is, Piers, standing by. We're going to talk about that next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BALDWIN: When it comes to CNN's Piers Morgan, there is absolutely no mystery about his view on guns. He supports tougher gun control laws.
Want you to watch his exchange between piers and Larry Pratt, owner of Gun Owners of America. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PIERS MORGAN, HOST, "PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT": I know why sales of these weapons have been soaring in the last few days. It's down to idiots like you. Mr. Pratt, thank you for joining me.
When we come back ...
LARRY PRATT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GUN OWNERS OF AMERICA: Thank you for your high-level argument, Mr. Morgan. It's really very good.
MORGAN: You know what? You wouldn't understand the meaning of the phrase high-level argument. You are a dangerous man espousing dangerous nonsense and ...
PRATT: Disarmament is dangerous. Ask Neville Chamberlain, your role model.
MORGAN: I know about role models. You're not one of them.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: Piers Morgan, Piers Morgan, you're hosting this town hall live tonight. That was quite an exchange you had.
First of all, I'm curious, have you heard from him since that interview, A, and, B, why do you feel so strongly about this particular issue?
MORGAN: Well, I've been on air for nearly two years at CNN here in America and I come from a country where we had an outrage like Sandy Hook in 1996 in Dunblane, in Scotland.
A madman went into a school, killed 16 five-year-old children. There was such a unanimity of outrage from left to right, politicians, from all kinds of people, the public rose as one with the politicians and said enough.
And there was a complete national handgun ban. And there have been no attacks involving guns on schools in Britain since.
The same thing happened around the same time in Australia. They had 35 people killed in Tasmania. That is the same thing that happened. They brought in stringent bans on assault weapons and they had no massacres since either.
I've been here -- there have been four outrages of similar magnitudes of those or worse since I've been here, and nothing ever gets done. Nobody seems to care.
The only thing that happens is that gun sales go up because the gun lobby, the gun rights people, the NRA, get out there, very fast, and say, if everybody had been armed in this school, or this movie theater, or this hospital or wherever it may be, then they would have killed the shooter.
So, the number of guns in a country that already has 300 million guns, one for every one in the country, just increases all the time. And that means when you get people who are deranged, like this killer in Sandy Hook, living in a house with six firearms including assault weapons, they can get their hands on them with impunity and it has got to stop.
BALDWIN: And then on top of that, there are people out there, including one of your guests who says, let's arm our teachers. Roll the video.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRATT: It seems so obvious that since we have concealed carry laws in all of our country now, people can get a concealed firearm, and yet we have laws that say not in schools.
And so in the very places that have been sought out by monsters such as the murderer of these adults and children, we're saying, no, we don't want you to be able to defend yourself. It's better that you just sit there and wait to be killed.
And we find that morally incomprehensible.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: I heard you laugh before we tossed to the sound bite, so I can only guess what your reaction would be to that suggestion. Is this something that will be brought up tonight? Tell me about this town hall. I know it's going to be feisty. I know you. It'll be fiery. Must-see hour TV here on CNN. Who are you talking to?
MORGAN: Well, we're going to have Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark. We're going to have Tom Ridge. He's obviously a lot of experience in this area. We're going to have Deepak Chopra.
We're going to have a lot of experts, a lot of people on both sides of this debate. I don't want it to be just one long shouting match with the gun rights people.
I have no problem at all with Americans that want to defend themselves at home with a handgun or a pistol and just have it there in case they're attacked. I get that is what an average American believes is their fundamental right under the Second Amendment.
Nor do I have any problem with people who want to hunt or shoot or other sporting pursuits with a gun when regulated.
This is my problem. So many of the weapons are unregulated. So many gun trades are done now where nobody has any clue who getting their hands on them.
We saw the NFL player involved in the shooting. He had eight weapons. This woman, the mother of the killer, at Sandy Hook, had six weapons. Why do you need this army of weapons?
My real problem, Brooke, is this. Not about getting all the guns, it is about the assault rifles. People don't seem to have a clue what an AR-15 can do. It I it was used in sandy hook, the shooting in the Oregon mall shooting, young men got their hands on the assault rifles. They're the nearest thing to an M-16 machine gun. These are military weapons.
I heard Christiane Amanpour saying earlier, she sees these on the battlefields, why should they be in the U.S., walked into our malls, our movie theaters, elementary schools?
BALDWIN: I hear you. I want to ask you one more thing. People say blame the media. The reason why these mass murders continue is because the media glorifies these shooters. I have my own thoughts. What are yours?
MORGAN: I just couldn't agree less because the point is you have to highlight what happens here and you have to learn from it. You have to learn how this disturbed young man living in this home.
Was he obsessed with video games? Was it due to a new obsession with guns because his mother took him to a firing range? Was it because his mother was apparently about to commit him to a psychiatric treatment? Who knows what it was? Was it his mental health?
Here is the thing. If he didn't have the guns, none of those children would have been shot and, so, you have to deal with the primary problem that America faces, which is guns -- guns, guns, guns. And it is nothing to do with the Second Amendment right to defend yourself and everything to do with military-style weapons that can slaughter.
These things can fire 100 bullets in a minute. They are machine guns designed for mass killing and you can buy them -- I can't buy six packets of Sudafed in a pharmacy in America, but I can buy an AR-15 machine gun. It is ridiculous.
BALDWIN: Want everyone to watch, live, special Piers Morgan town hall, CNN, 9:00 Eastern. Be there.
Piers, thank you.
MORGAN: Thanks, Brooke.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BALDWIN: Conservative jurist Robert Bork has died today at his home in Virginia and a quarter-century later wounds haven't yet healed from Bork's tumultuous brush with the U.S. Senate which rejected Bork for a seat on the Supreme Courts.
Democrats portrayed Robert Bork as a right-wing zealot. Republicans countered that Bork was the victim of a smear campaign.
Listen, if you would, to then-Senator Joseph Biden grilling Robert Bork on a case involving privacy rights in the bedroom.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SENATOR JOE BIDEN (D), DELAWARE: If they had evidence that a crime was being committed ...
ROBERT BORK, SUPREME COURT NOMINEE: How are they going to get evidence that a couple are using contraceptives ...
BIDEN: A wiretap.
BORK: Wiretapping?
BIDEN: A wiretap.
BORK: You mean to say that ...
BIDEN: A legal wiretap.
BORK: You mean to say that a magistrate's going to authorize a wiretap to find out if a couple is using contraceptives?
BIDEN: They could, couldn't they under the law?
BORK: Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: The issues that Bork was defeated on -- is there a right to privacy in the Constitution? Is abortion a right that women enjoy under the Constitution? Those are the issues that are still at the heart of what the Supreme Court fights about.
The Supreme Court is going to address the issue of same-sex marriage come March. That was the kind of issue that Bork spoke out on. This was a fight for the ages and extremely significant.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: Robert Bork had suffered from heart disease. He was 85- years-old.
As many of you are getting ready to get out and about for the holidays, the forecast, not great. In fact, between rain and blizzards, we could be in for a big travel mess.
Chad Myers has the forecast, next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BALDWIN: Let's talk weather. A quick little reminder about a winter storm barreling through the Plains States towards the Midwest, we're talking blizzard conditions, whiteout conditions, wind of up to 50- miles-an-hour.
This is from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, up to Wisconsin, Des Moines, Lincoln, Green Bay, Madison, all could get hit. Possible snow tomorrow also in Chicago.
Chad Myers warns us the storm's potentially deadly. So he says just think really carefully -- really, really carefully -- about driving in some of those effected areas.
Be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BALDWIN: And before I let you go, "Time" magazine unveiled its Person of the Year today. He is Barack Obama for a second time here.
The magazine calls him "both the symbol and, in some ways, the architect of this new America." That was a quote.
Also on the list, potentially here, it was Malala Yousufzai, number two. She is the Pakistani teenager who survived a gunshot wound to her head for promoting the rights of girls to get an education, despite an attempt by the Taliban to silence her.
Number three, the successor to Apple's Steve Jobs, Tim Cook.
A couple of people there on the list for "Time" magazine's Person of the Year.
I'm Brooke Baldwin at the CNN World Headquarters in Atlanta. Thanks so much for being with me today. See you tomorrow.
In the meantime, we go to Wolf Blitzer. Hey, Wolf.
BLITZER: Brooke, thanks very much.
