Rand Paul: Celebrities certainly seem a little hypocritical about self-defense, huh?

The money quotes, pun intended, come at the 4:30 mark of last night’s appearance by Rand Paul on Hannity, but the entire clip is worth watching. Eric Bolling guest-hosted for Sean Hannity last night, and also pressed Paul for a solid commitment to filibuster Harry Reid’s gun-control bill, which Paul gave the second time Bolling brought it up.  But given the $12 million that Michael Bloomberg has pledged to campaign against Senators opposed to gun control and Jim Carrey’s strange entry into the debate, the shot across the celebrity bow is what got Politico’s attention:

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“I don’t begrudge any famous person like Mayor Bloomberg, or the president or the president’s family for having protection — I think they all should. There’s enough crazy people out there that would attack on the right or the left. But I think when you are being protected by people who have weapons by responsible people, I can’t see why you would be opposed to that for other people,” Paul, a Kentucky Republican, said Thursday on Fox News’s “Hannity” to guest-host Eric Bolling.

He continued: “Many rich Hollywood celebrities have armed guards with them at all times and many regular people who live in a poor neighborhood, who have a business in a poor neighborhood and a neighborhood that may have higher crime — those people have to suffer the vicissitudes of violent crime without protection sometimes because of gun control laws. So, yes, I think there is a certain amount of hypocrisy.”

Earlier in the interview, Paul hammers Barack Obama for his “showmanship.” He points out, correctly, that nothing in Reid’s bill would have prevented the shooting that Obama is exploiting to push gun control.  Saving lives is a critical goal, Paul tells Bolling, but Obama and his allies keep skipping over the one thing that could have prevented or limited the Newtown death toll — robust self-defense.

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Bolling asks Paul whether leadership is fully behind him on this fight, and Paul answers that he hasn’t seen “any fissures” in the Senate Republican caucus.  We’ll see when the filibuster gets fully under way.

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