President Obama addressed the issue of gun control once again in the wake of yet another massacre with a firearm, speaking to an annual meeting of the nation's mayors in San Francisco.
Wrapping together his frustrations with the country’s continuing problems with racism and his own inability to make progress on gun control in the wake of the South Carolina church shooting, President Barack Obama stood before a bipartisan gathering of mayors here Friday and declared, “It is not good enough simply to show sympathy.”
“The apparent motivations of the shooter remind us that racism remains a blight that we have to combat together. We have made great progress but we have to be vigilant because it still lingers,” Obama said.
There must be a popular outcry for gun control, Obama said, to change the minds of a Congress that he said he knows right now won’t touch the issue.
“I refuse to act as if this is the new normal or to pretend that it’s simply sufficient to grieve and that any mention of us doing something to stop it is somehow politicizing the problem,” he said.
Obama said he knew his comments about the lack of hope for gun control in the current Congress when making his initial comments about shooting at the White House on Thursday were interpreted as resignation. They weren’t, he insisted.
“I am not resigned. I have faith we will eventually do the right thing. I was simply making the point that we have to move public opinion. We have to feel a sense of urgency,” he said.
America, Obama said, is “awash with easily accessible guns.”
It's all true of course, but the reality is America no longer wants gun control regulation, especially with a black president.
As you can see, America lost its appetite for additional gun control in 2009 and support for that has been soft ever since. Republicans voted against President Obama's package of background checks (which Americans did say they wanted) in 2013 and were rewarded by voters in 2014 with an even larger majority in the House and control of the Senate.
You tell me why we don't have national background checks.