You want to know exactly where Eric Church stands in the political conversation, he’ll go ahead and tell you.
He voted for Bush in 2004, he voted for Obama in 2008, he did not vote for Obama again in 2012 (or at anybody at all), and he didn’t vote for Trump (or Hillary) in 2016.
“I don’t want to vote for somebody I’ll regret voting for.”
In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Eric dug deep into all things politics, and in the wake of the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting, which he headlined on Friday, his conversation on gun control has quickly become the biggest point of contention.
A self-proclaimed “Second Amendment guy,” Eric owns quite a few guns including rifles, shotguns and handguns, but overall, he does favor some gun reforms:
“I’m a Second Amendment guy. That’s in the Constitution, it’s people’s right, and I don’t believe it’s negotiable. But nobody should have that many guns and that much ammunition and we don’t know about it. Nobody should have 21 AKs and 10,000 rounds of ammunition and we don’t know who they are. Something’s gotta be done so that a person can’t have an armory and pin down a Las Vegas SWAT team for six minutes. That’s f*cked up.”
He reflects back on the footage from the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting, the most deadly shooting in American history.
“As a gun guy, the number of rounds fired was un-f*cking-believable to me. I saw a video on YouTube from the police officer’s vest cam, and it sounded like an army was up there. I don’t think our forefathers ever thought the right to bear arms was that.”
Church also went on to acknowledge that evil is evil, and no amount of regulation is going to stop that. However, he thinks the lobbyists who are stuffing the pockets of politicians, most notably the NRA, end up doing more harm than good.
“There are some things we can’t stop… like the disgruntled kid who takes his dad’s shotgun and walks into a high school. But we could have stopped the guy in Vegas. I blame the lobbyists. And the biggest in the gun world is the NRA. I’m a Second Amendment guy, but I feel like they’ve been a bit of a roadblock. I don’t care who you are, you shouldn’t have that kind of power over elected officials.”
And of course, Eric received a ton of blowback from his comments in the article, but no matter where you fall on the political spectrum these days, if you voice your opinion, you’re going to find a group of people that disagree with you. That’s just the way it is.
But at the end of the day, Eric pretty much summed up how he feels about politicians and America’s two-party system with the recent release of his song, “The Snake.” Simply put, you have copperheads on one side of the aisle, and you have rattlesnakes on the other.
And the whole world’s burning down…
