President Barack Obama’s press conference about the shooting in Oregon’s Umpqua Community College earlier today, in which 13 people were killed and more than 20 injured, saw the president fed up and pleading, like he has many times before, for stricter gun laws.
The President said niceties like “our thoughts and prayers” were not enough in this horrible instance, nor in the many that have preceded it. “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 someplace else in America,” he said.
Instead the president promised to be active and said that he would push for gun control each time something like this happened—although he later said he hoped he wouldn’t have to talk about something like this again during the remainder of his term, but he said “based on [his] experience” he expects to. "I'm going to bring this up. Each time this happens I'm going to say that we can actually do something about it, but we're going to have to change our laws,” Obama said. “And this is not something I can do by myself. I've got to have a Congress, and I've got to have state legislators and governors who are willing to work with me on this."
He explained how the frequency of mass shootings and the aftermath in the U.S. have become a routine, like extending “our thoughts and prayers,” that has inevitably made us “numb.” “Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine, my response here at this podium ends up being routine, the conversation in the aftermath of it, we've become numb to this,” Obama said, before reiterating the need for gun control. "It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun."
[via CBS]
