During a segment on her Monday MSNBC show using the third anniversary of the Newtown school shooting to demand gun control, host Andrea Mitchell pleaded for national legislation: “Andrew Cuomo, the governor who passed really tough gun legislation in New York....Yet he has said that it is impossible task because you can't do it state by state.”

She claimed states that support gun rights were to blame: “It has to be a national conversation because those guns just come in, in people's trunks from the south and they are actually more valuable because they get sold on the black market in New York City...”

Fellow MSNBC anchor Kate Snow agreed: “Right, one state's law doesn't stop the next state – someone in the next state from having a gun.”

At the top of the segment, Mitchell touted Snow’s interview with parents of two of the children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut:

And it has been three years since the day 20 children and six staff members were gunned down in a Connecticut elementary school. A tragedy that many thought would transform the national debate over gun violence in America. Since Sandy Hook, 554 children under the age of 12 have been killed by a firearm. MSNBC's Kate snow asked the parents of two Newtown victims about guns in America.

In the portion of the interview that was featured, Snow urged parents Mark Barden and Nicole Hockley to wade into 2016 campaign politics:

> In light of San Bernardino, I want to ask about politics just a little bit because we're in the middle of a heated presidential race. Donald Trump came out and said, the GOP frontrunner, that if everyone in that room had been armed, they would have been able to take out the shooters. > Do you worry at all about the discourse right now, the conversation around gun control and gun rights and gun ownership? And then, by the way, the number of people buying guns right now is way up. They had the biggest sales ever on Black Friday.

Following the taped portion of the exchange, Snow lamented the failure of Democrats to use the tragedy to push through gun control:

A lot of people thought, Andrea, that it would be after Sandy Hook, that you know – you remember Joe Biden lobbying and trying to get those measures passed the spring after Newtown and it just didn't happen. But they do feel like we’re now maybe approaching another tipping point and perhaps there’s – you know, what they want is a move toward consensus. They want everybody on the same page because I don't think there's anyone in America who’s not horrified by the number of shootings that we're having.

Mitchell chimed in: “And I’ve gotten to know Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly, of course, through all of this. They were at the White House last week. They have tried. They have dedicated themselves to this passion and, you know, passionate cause, and tried to make it a national cause.”

Here is a full transcript of the December 14 segment: