No, I’m not saying that she wants to hurt people. She might, but if so, she’s been fortunate enough to not have video of her saying it pop up for the whole world to see.
As it stands, Scranton, Pennsylvania, Mayor Paige Cognetti is trying to unseat a Republican incumbent as she runs for the US House of Representatives, and some old video has surfaced from a while back where she seems to fantasize about a world that doesn’t make any sense to a rational human being.
She wants a world with no guns in anyone’s hands, even the police, apparently.
Democratic Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti said she supported disarming police officers and wanted to emulate Japan’s gun-control laws in a resurfaced video from 2020.
Cognetti, who is seeking to unseat Republican Pennsylvania Rep. Rob Bresnahan in the Eighth Congressional District, has a history of supporting anti-Second Amendment groups, notably Everytown. She made the remarks about Japan’s gun-control laws during a June 2020 virtual town hall in which she also said she wanted to disarm police.
“I would love to get to a world where a country where we don’t have or police don’t have firearms and where we don’t have firearms that citizens aren’t carrying them either,” Cognetti said. “I’ve lived in Japan for a couple years. There are no guns there and it’s lovely.”
“We don’t have to worry about some of these things because there are no guns there. That would be something that would be a great reality for us to live in,” Cognetti continued.
…
“It’s something that we have to work toward. So I commit to work toward gun-control policies,” Cognetti added. Cognetti also received the Everytown’s endorsement for her mayoral reelection bid in 2025.
Video of her saying it:
Unearthed footage reveals Democrat candidate Paige Cognetti (PA-08) fantasizing about disarming law abiding citizens AND the police.👇
“I would love to get to a world where police don’t have firearms and where citizens are not carrying them either.” pic.twitter.com/qWtU7ZMyio
— Congressional Leadership Fund (@CLFSuperPAC) June 23, 2026
Now, I have no doubt that her time in Japan was lovely. I’ve got a friend, an Englishman, who lives there with his wife, and he seems to love it, too. The country is beautiful, and the people are very friendly in every interaction I’ve had with the Japanese. It seems they learned a lesson or two about being rude to Americans since the 1940s.
But Japan isn’t the United States. While they love American culture to a significant degree, they love it in a distinctly Japanese way. They are not us. Their nation doesn’t resemble ours in so many ways. To look at what seems to work for them and to just assume you can disarm the entire world because Japan has few problems–but don’t say they have no problems because of their gun control laws.
Let’s understand that she wants to disarm people like you and me, as well as the police, all while knowing on some level that the criminals out there don’t actually care about the law.
In other words, the policies she advocated for in 2020 wouldn’t turn the United States into Japan. It would create a world where Iryna Zarutska’s murder wouldn’t be radicalizing for a lot of people; it would be the norm.
After all, our “non-gun homicide rate” is typically higher than most nations’ total homicide rate. That includes Japan, by the way.
What’s happening is that Cognetti thinks she can pretend to be moderate while holding such a radical view on guns, and she hoped no one would see what she said back in 2020. True, a lot of us had a lot going on that year, but too many people remember what she said, and it was just a matter of time before that became public.
This is dangerous thinking from any public official or candidate, and Cognetti happens to be both at the moment. Not only should she lose every election going forward, but such backward thinking needs to be purged from even passing consideration by the American public.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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