“Thoughts And Prayers Are Not Enough”: Obama, Yet Again, Calls For Gun-Control Laws
In what he acknowledged has become a familiar event, the president once again spoke to the nation after a mass shooting.
President Obama was blunt and unequivocal in his response to the shooting Thursday at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon that left 10 dead, “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough.”
“It’s not enough,” he continued. “It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel, and it does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted somewhere else in America — next week or a couple of months from now.”
He was explicit: In order to stem this “continuing cause of death for innocent people,” America needed to pass new laws.
The president said that this had become a dispiritingly routine event: The reporting is routine; his remarks, standing at the podium, were routine; the national conversation in the aftermath was routine; and the response from the guns-rights lobby, loudly balking at even the most modest regulations, was routine.
“We have become numb,” he said.
“It’s fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds,” Obama said, addressing the specter of mental illness, another typical motif of our national post-shooting conversation. “But we are not the only country on Earth that has people with mental illnesses or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months.”
He asked that the media report on the numbers of Americans killed by terrorism as compared to the number killed by gun violence. He lamented that the nation could spend over $1 trillion, and devote entire agencies and reams of campaign rhetoric, to the fight against terrorism, but the most common-sense gun-control legislation can’t even make it through a filibuster.
Anticipating critics who would accuse him of politicizing the tragedy, Obama fired back: “This is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.”
When people die in mining accidents, he said, we make mines safer. When people die in car accidents, we enact seatbelt laws. When roads are unsafe, we fix them. “The notion that gun violence is somehow different, that our freedom, that our Constitution prohibits any modest regulation of how we use a deadly weapon when there are law-abiding gun owners all across the country… It doesn’t make sense.”
States with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths, he noted. Claims by anti-gun-control opponents are “not borne out by the evidence.”
He enjoined voters who felt that gun control could and should be enacted to elect representatives who shared those beliefs and were prepared to act on them.
He reached out to law-abiding gun owners, whom he claimed polls showed supported background checks and closing the so-called gun show loophole, and asked them “to think about whether your views are being properly represented by the organization that suggests it’s speaking for you.”
He invoked the names of cities, towns, and schools marked by massacres, which have become bywords for gun violence: Columbine, Blacksburg, Aurora, Newtown, Tucson, Charleston.
And now Roseburg.
By: Sam Reisman, The National Memo, October 1, 2015
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mykeystrokes.com 
I saw the President’s comments and he expresses how many in the country feel. His words are sober about an unfortunate, but no longer surprising, topic. Americans have responded to several surveys and favor extended background checks and elongated waiting periods. These surveys include Republican voters and responsible gun owners, who also favor these things in the majority. Yet, we fail to act. Of course, there are more reasons to be dealt with, but access to guns is definitely part of the equation.
Yet, our politicians do not care that much about what people think. They care more about their funders and the NRA will make them wet their pants. Our current Congress went so far, this year, to say we should not collect data on gun deaths as part of a review of health issues, as it is not part of health. This is from the retiring Speaker of the House. That is poor stewardship in my mind. And, it is more than mass shootings. It is what happens everyday – pick up any paper, any day and count the number of gun deaths stories.
This is not a one party problem, as there are Democrats too scared to take on the NRA as they can get fervent gun rights owners to polls in primaries. But, advancing gun rights is clearly in the platform of the GOP and they should no longer tout they are a pro-life party. You cannot advocate the freer access to guns and say you are pro-life. We must have better governance of guns as to do otherwise is criminal in my view.
Here is a quick math exercise. Take the 23 wealthiest countries in the world. If you add up all their gun deaths, the US has 80% of them. If you add up teen and children gun deaths for these 23 countries, the US has 87% of them. Canada likes it guns, but we have three times the rate of gun deaths per 1,000 than they do.
We have a problem in the US and our politicians do not have the stomach to address it and some actually add gasoline to the fire. This is from an Independent voter, former Republican and Democrat who is long since tired of the BS. Keith
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