“In an ideal world, people wouldn’t own handguns,” Julian Castro, Democratic presidential candidate recently told The New York Times.
Castro, a former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, and an ex-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, provided this reply to a question posed by the NYT. The newspaper had asked Democratic contenders for the White House about their views on gun control.
In providing a context for the questions, the Times wrote: “Democrats have largely converged on a moderate, consensus view of gun control, focused on tightening background checks and banning military-style weaponry. We wanted to get at a deeper question of values—who thinks there are good reasons to own guns, and who thinks we’d be better off without them altogether.”
The gun-control question was one of 18 questions for the candidates to answer.
According to media reports, Castro also said: “And there are a number of countries around the world where people do not own handguns, where they’re not permitted. And those countries have more safety, greater safety, less violent deaths and so forth.”
Castro has come out in favor of gun control. In fact, he said he would like to change the Second Amendment, which he stated in 2012 to TV host Charlie Rose.