Joy Behar is known for her snarky one-liners on “The View,” but on Tuesday morning, she brought the audience to a grinding halt with one particular choice of sentiment regarding Jordan Neely, the houseless man who was killed in a New York subway car on Thursday.
In case you’re just getting up to speed, last week, a man named Jordan Neely was killed in New York, after yelling at passengers on a subway train that he was hungry and thirsty and tired of having nothing. He was killed because another rider responded by putting him in a chokehold, despite the fact that Neely was not actually threatening anyone. That passenger has not been arrested.
To kick off the day’s Hot Topics discussion, the women of “The View” mourned the fact that the altercation ended in Neely’s death, rather than helping him to a shelter of some sort, but Behar argued that “it’s a very complicated story” and “not an open-and-shut case.”
Pointing out that Neely had been arrested several times prior to the incident, and was actually on a list of homeless people at high risk, Behar noted that “the system failed that boy.” But, she also noted that the man who ended up killing him was a Marine, who was trained in proper chokeholds, and might’ve just “made a mistake.”
As the conversation progressed, the women of “The View” got into detail about Neely’s prior arrests, with Sara Haines explaining that Neely had reached a deal with authorities and was battling drug addiction.
“If he stayed clean for 15 months, they would reduce that charge for him. But, you can’t make people stay if they don’t want to — and he had been in multiple times — or if they can’t, due to addiction problems,” she said. “But the point is, there’s only so much that can be done, which is why this is a tragedy on so many levels.”
At that, Behar chimed in once more.
“And if he lived in Texas, they would give him a gun,” she snarked.
The host was immediately met by dead silence from the audience, and what sounded like a shocked chuckle from one of her co-hosts, though it’s unclear who.
Behar was, of course, referring to the fact that, even after the shooting in Allen, Texas, that occurred over the weekend, Texas lawmakers are still advocating for looser gun restrictions. The host has been vocally anti-gun for some time now, and even went on a rant about Texas Gov. Greg Abbott later in the show.
But, in the moment, guns were not at all part of the conversation. So, moderator Whoopi Goldberg moved them along after the silence.
You can watch part of the conversation from “The View” in the video above.