Police were still examining the crime scene in the killing of nine worshipers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, responding to a bomb threat and searching for a suspect in the killings when President Barack Obama took to the microphone to push his gun control agenda.
After a few comments about the senseless act and personal recollections the president had of Reverend Clementa Pinckney who was killed in the incident, the president launched an attack on the Second Amendment gun rights of law-abiding Americans.
In his remarks from the White House before leaving on a fundraising trip to Los Angeles that he chose not to cancel, the president said:
“We do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”
“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this kind of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. It is in our power to do something about it.”
The exasperated president said that he had to “make statements like this too many times” referring to several high profile killings that have occurred during his presidency including the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and two separate Islamic terrorist incidents at Fort Hood.
The president added that “Communities like (Charleston) have had to endure tragedies like this too many times.”
When asked for his reaction to the president’s political comments about the shooting at the oldest predominantly black church in the nation, presidential candidate Rand Paul said he was skeptical that the government had a solution to the lone wolf killer who snaps.
“What kind of person goes in a church and shoots nine people? There’s a sickness in our country. There’s something terribly wrong, but it isn’t going to be fixed by your government,” the Kentucky senator said.
Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association spokesman Andrew Arulanandam told CNN that the NRA declined to comment following the President’s remarks Thursday afternoon saying “The NRA will not be making any public statements until the facts are known.”
Obama also said on Thursday that the current political arrangement in Washington, with Republicans in control both houses of Congress, means new gun control laws remains unlikely during his presidency.
“The politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now.”, Obama said. “At some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.”
The president did not comment on fact that even if all of the gun control measures he has supported during his presidency and in the Senate were law today that they would have stopped the killings committed by a lone insane gunman.
