(AllHipHop News) Hip-Hop star T.I. fears the government will “enslave” Americans if citizens are banned from bearing arms.
The rapper and producer spent several months in jail back in 2009 for federal weapons charges and he was also put on house arrest for a year and forced to perform 1,500 hours of community service following his 2007 bust for possession of three unregistered guns and two silencers.
Although firearms landed him in big trouble in the past, T.I. is still convinced U.S. citizens should be allowed to own firearms, despite the outcry for harsher gun laws following the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which cost 17 people their lives.
“It’s a tough one,” he mused to TMZ on Thursday. “I think you should probably make it more difficult for people who aren’t mentally stable to have guns… (but) I just honestly feel like if you lose the right to bear arms as a citizen, then you know what I’m saying, it’s easy to enslave. It’s easy for the government to enslave people when they don’t have the right to bear arms.”
T.I., real name Clifford Joseph Harris, Jr., was also indicted for carrying weapons as a convicted felon, but he doesn’t think to focus on former criminals is the solution to eradicating shooting deaths in the U.S.
“I think mental stabilization needs to be a big part (of gun legislation)… Just not being a felon isn’t enough,” he noted. “We see that, that isn’t working. People think that (it’s) the felons that’s causing all the problems, but you know, it seems as though people who have been given a gun license, who bought guns legally… those are the ones causing all the mass hysteria, so I think that our system’s broken.”