CNN "State of the Union with Candy Crowley" - Transcript -

Interview

CROWLEY: Joining me now from Salt Lake City, Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah. Senator, thank you so much for joining us.

SEN. MIKE LEE, (R) UTAH: Thank you.

CROWLEY: This is a sad way, a tragic way, to begin one's freshman year on Capitol Hill. But I wanted to first get your reaction and -- and let you comment on the news from Tucson.

LEE: Well, first of all, my thoughts and prayers go out to Representative Giffords and Judge Roll and their families as well as the families of the other victims. This is a tragedy, and I'm -- I'm very sorry for the losses that have happened there. This is not something that should happen in our society. And something that we want to prevent from happening.

CROWLEY: Senator, I don't know how often you check out the Internet which contains just about anything you might want to see and a lot of things you don't want to see. We have gotten some press releases with people calling on "the right" or conservatives or the Tea Party to condemn this violence. The Tea Party, in fact, several factions of it, were some of the first to come out and condemn what happened.

But I wonder what you make of the politics of trying to figure this out. In a sense, just even talking about this now, and the level of political rhetoric, becomes in itself a political battle.

LEE: Well, I think we all need to resist the impulse to turn it into a political football this is a tragedy. And it is disrespectful to the victims and their families to use it for short-term political gain. I don't think we can tie this incident to anything other than to a person that's either evil or mentally insane or some combination of both. And at this point it doesn't make any sense to turn it into a partisan political battle.

CROWLEY: It doesn't. And yet for some time even before this, there's been talk that the heated rhetoric has gone too far. That, in fact, you know that if people are mentally unstable as the sheriff said yesterday, they do glom onto things that aren't meant the way they are taken. But nonetheless the political rhetoric got to a point where everybody needed to step back.

Do you think the rhetoric from the Tea Party, from the left, from any place has been too heated and too much?

LEE: Well, any time you have political rhetoric that rises to the level of personal, you have a problem. And I think that doesn't make for good politics. It doesn't make for good statesmanship or good government whenever we have ad homonym attacks. If you are attacking a person rather than an issue, are you attacking policy head on, you're focusing on the wrong thing.

CROWLEY: And what do you make - I mean, there's lots of - and I think this will fulfill a lot of air time for a while, but there's a -- you heard in our previous two senators talking about what about some gun control here? Obviously, a different gun culture in the west than there is in the urban east. And so what do you make of that? Do you think there is room for a discussion about gun control, particularly when it comes to people who have shown signs of instability?

And immigration, the sheriff also seemed to sort of intimate that this had become so heated this talk about people who don't have their documents, illegal immigrants that that to just led to this kind of culture that influenced people to go out and do violence. Do you agree with that?

LEE: Well, I guess you raise two different questions. On the gun control issue, we have state and federal laws on the books that already prohibit person who's have been deemed mentally insane from owning and possessing firearms. I don't think we'll legislate our way out of risk associated with people who are insane or people who are bent on performing evil acts to kill another person. And to the contrary, I think there is abundant research suggesting that in cities where more people own guns, the crime rate, especially the murder rate actually goes down.

So as to the second question, about whether or not we ought to tone down the rhetoric, look, like I say, we can always all benefit by focusing issues back on the political issues rather than on the person. That's good for statesmanship, good for politics, good for government. It's not something that's necessarily going to prevent tragedies like this one which hopefully will be few and far between. But it's nonetheless a noble aspiration, one I aspire to.

CROWLEY: So, when we talked earlier to some people involved in law enforcement on Capitol Hill and protecting congress people who said that there has said there has been over the past decade increasing - increasing over the past two years, increasing numbers of threats against public officials. We have seen an increase in the number of specific categories of violence sort of nationwide, although not -- not across the board. What accounts for that? If it's not the political rhetoric, what is making things seem so much worse now in terms of the number or threat level?

LEE: I don't know. And I don't think anyone pretends to have the answer to that. And some have pointed to a breakdown in the family structure. Many people who engage in these activities come from families that have broken down in one form or another. I don't know anything about the perpetrator of this particular crime. So I won't try to speak to that. But there -- there does appear to have been an up tick in acts of violence. And I think that's unfortunate. It's something we need to work to address.

CROWLEY: Do you quickly worry about your own safety?

LEE: No, I don't. You know, no more than I did last week. This obviously draws attention to it, but it's not going to cause me to change the way I do business. I don't think we should be adding any barrier between a member of congress and her constituents. I think we live in a free society in which it's absolutely essential that our elected leaders have constant and open contact with the public. And tragic events like this one will not deter us in communicating directly with our constituents.

CROWLEY: Freshman senator, Republican Senator Mike Lee thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it.

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