Geraldo Blindsides Hannity with Gun Control Rant: ‘This Is a National Emergency!’

It’s not every day you hear a passionate plea for action to prevent gun violence on Hannity.

In the aftermath of the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook, Sean Hannity made an attempt to “forget all the other debates”—read: gun control—and instead focus on school security. For a moment, it seemed like his guest Geraldo Rivera might be going along with that premise, but then he made a hard left turn.

“They should be at least as secure as airports,” Rivera said of America’s schools. But moments later, he was going in on the “psycho punk loser with a machine gun, an AR-15, slaughtering these innocents” in Parkland, Florida, on Wednesday.

Hannity’s viewers were quick to point out on Twitter that an AR-15 is not technically a “machine gun,” but Rivera was just getting started. “It makes me sick,” he said. “How’d he get the gun? How’d he get the thousand-dollar gun? How’d he get all these magazines? Where are his parents? Where are his parents? Where was his family? Where were his friends, for goodness’ sake?”

“It is just absolutely outrageous,” he continued. “Twenty-five of these school massacres since Columbine in 1999? When are we going to see that this is a national emergency?!”

Then came a question that seemed to be aimed directly at President Donald Trump, who very well may have watching Hannity’s show instead of addressing the nation. “You want to spend $25 billion on a wall?” Rivera asked. “What about spending $25 billion on making our schools secure from these savages, who all they want to do is inflict blood and mayhem?”

Instead of acknowledging Rivera’s argument, Hannity said we need to “get away from” the “same, predictable, frankly insane, and intellectually lightweight” debates about guns and get back to the important issue plaguing America: school security.

“I agree with everything you're saying,” Rivera replied, “but the AR-15 was designed to kill people. Ever since the Brady ban expired, we’ve been selling them like hotcakes.”

“This is not a gun debate,” Hannity told him. “This is a keep kids safe debate.” On Fox News primetime, those two things are not considered one and the same.