Tennessee state senator Stacey Campfield is refusing to apologize for posting a joke about pressure cookers on his blog in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing.
Because the suspects responsible for the explosion used pressure cookers when building their bombs, the Republican senator used a photo of a pressure cooker to mockingly insinuate that because pressure cookers are inanimate objects, just like guns, neither should be banned.
In the photo, the words "Assault Pressure Cooker (APC)" are printed below the picture of the pressure cooker. The photo also includes labels and arrows pointing to all of the pot's "dangerous" features including a "muzzle break thingy that goes 'up'" and a "tactical pistol grip." It goes on to describe the cooking device as "large-capacity, can cook for hours without reloading" and "evil" because it is black.
The blog post, entitled "Here comes Feinstein again," is a direct attack against Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein and her efforts in leading the battle for gun control and seeking to ban military-style assault weapons. The image suggests that pressure cookers might be her next target.
Critics called Campfield's joke insensitive and "tasteless", however, in response the lawmaker told ABCNews.com, "I think it's tasteless when Obama will drag everybody he can up to Capitol Hill and try to pass gun control," he said. "I think that was classless and tasteless. I don't hear them complaining about that too much."
"I was showing the hypocrisy of Diane Feinstein, the gun grabbers, of their inability to realize that it is a person that does activity, not an inanimate object, be it a gun or a pressure cooker," he said.
Campfield also doubled down on the joke by writing a follow-up blog titled, "Inappropriate? Me? Never!"
"If my post was inappropriate talking about 'crock pot control' then where is the outrage from the left when they push for gun control after the Sandy Hook shooting? Im [sic] sorry if I exposed your double standard....Well, not really," he wrote.
CNN's Piers Morgan took on the GOP legislator in a live interview about his controversial joke.
"We're talking about an inanimate object that does nothing by itself," said Campfield told Morgan, comparing a firearm to a pressure cooker. "It does absolutely nothing by itself just like a pressure cooker does absolutely nothing by itself."
"The joke was really about the left and how they push for gun control on inanimate objects just like pushing for spoon control for obesity, it doesn't do anything."
Watch the clip below.