Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) went on MSNBC on Wednesday to celebrate strict new gun laws passed by the New York State legislature and signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo this week. In doing so, he noted that New York is more liberal than most of the country and that some regions, particularly the South, have “cultures that we have to overcome” in order to enact stricter national gun laws.
“This is not Constitutional rights, this is common sense,” Rangel said, referring to new gun laws. “We know that those people that incorporated the right to bear arms was not talking about the slaughter of children that’s happened in Newtown, Connecticut.”
“Do you think that New York and what has been done in this state could be used as a role model for other states that would like to enact something of New York’s model?” MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts asked.
“I hope so,” Rangel replied. “New York is different and more progressive than a lot of areas in other states, and some of the Southern areas have cultures that we have to overcome.”
Rangel is not the first to question the culture of the South. In a recent New Yorker article, writer George Packer wrote about how the culture of the South is different from much of the rest of the country:
For a century after losing the Civil War, the South was America’s own colonial backwater—“not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it,” W. J. Cash wrote in his classic 1941 study, “The Mind of the South.” From Tyler, Texas, to Roanoke, Virginia, Southern places felt unlike the rest of the country. The region was an American underbelly in the semi-tropical heat; the manners were softer, the violence swifter, the commerce slower, the thinking narrower, the past closer.
It would seem that much of the culture of the South has remained stagnant, and now starkly contrasts the culture of the rest of America.
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