MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews said that “I don’t know whether criminals actually buy guns at the store” and that murders are committed “oftentimes without any use of a gun” on Thursday.

Matthews stated, in a discussion on the shootings of two police officers in Ferguson, MO “I don’t want to get back to just, here’s another case for gun control, but I’ve been listening to, I guess a lot of my liberal friends…and they say this is just too many guns around, but I don’t know whether criminals actually buy guns at the store” before asking Black Law Enforcement Alliance Director Marq Claxton what his experience was.

After Claxton blamed the lack of national laws on guns, and the larger issue of violence in the US, Matthews remarked “people, when they want to kill somebody, they kill in — the most ghastly methods that — oftentimes without any use of a gun. It is a violent country.”

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