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Michigan Senate candidate wants to ‘arm the homeless’

Posted at 5:04 PM, Mar 16, 2018
and last updated 2018-03-16 17:07:01-04

ROYAL OAK, Mich. — A U.S. Senate candidate from Michigan is raising eyebrows because of his proposal to “arm the homeless.”

Brian Ellison, a libertarian from Royal Oak who is running against incumbent Sen. Debbie Stabenow, wants to raise $10,000 to provide 20 homeless people with weapons and training.  He says they are more likely to be victims of a crime.

“They don’t have the means to protect themselves,” Ellison told FOX 2 Detroit. “If you wanted to own a gun you could, I certainly do, but they don’t have the means to do that so they’re just easy targets.”

Carmi Finn with the gun control group Moms Demand Action tells FOX 2 that this proposal “has ‘really bad idea’ written all over it.” She said there’s no way to perform background checks on some homeless people without IDs.

“It’s true the homeless are more likely to be victims then the population at large,” said Carmi Finn. “But I think giving them shotguns is not going to help them one little bit.”

She also mentioned that they would not have a way to safely store guns.

“If you do not have a home, you do not have a gun safe and you don’t have any place to safely store that gun to protect yourself or the people around you, or to keep it from being stolen by other criminals on the street,” Finn said.

FOX 2 told Ellison that many would make the argument that “if you really care about the homeless you would be working really hard to get them off the street and not so much to put guns in their hands.”

He replied: “Well I think the implication is everyone wants to be off the street or everyone wants to work. Some people just want to be left alone.”