This past weekend, America suffered a great loss when two separate mass shootings took the lives of innocent people in El Paso and Dayton. Twenty-two people were tragically killed in the Texas city while nine were killed in the Ohio city with dozens more injured in both locations. While President Donald Trump has dropped off a few words to the fallen victims, Barack Obama has come through with the statement the families deserve with a lengthy, powerful note on the need to hold "public officials accountable for changing our gun laws" so such heinous acts never happen again.
“[N]o other nation on Earth comes close to experiencing the frequency of mass shootings that we see in the United States,” Obama wrote. “Every time this happens, we’re told that tougher gun laws won’t stop all murders; they won’t stop every deranged individual from getting a weapon and shooting innocent people in public places. But the evidence shows that they can stop some killings. They can save some families from heartbreak.
Obama continued by calling on law enforcement to do something about white supremacy groups and a need for officials to “come up with better strategies to reduce the influence of these hate groups.”
"We should roundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments,” he wrote, detailing how Americans should reject “leaders who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people.”
Read the statement in full below.
https://twitter.com/_/status/1158453079035002881
