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Obama on Oregon Shooting: ‘This Is Something We Should Politicize’
President Obama delivered an angry statement on the Thursday shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, OR. “Each time we see one of these mass shootings,” he said from the White House briefing room podium, “our thoughts and prayers are not enough.
In a 15-minute statement, Obama stressed that the US is “the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every couple of months.” He praised the gun control efforts in Australia, a nation that conducted a mass confiscation of firearms from its citizenry.
The President repeatedly complained about the Republican-led Congress and gun rights advocates. “There is a gun for roughly every man, woman, and child in America,” he said, “so how can you with a straight face say more guns will make us safer?”
Obama claimed that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths and repeatedly called for “common-sense” gun safety legislation. “Somebody somewhere will comment and say, ‘Obama politicized this issue.’ Well, this is something we should politicize,” the President said.
Instead of offering a plan of his own, Obama told voters to change American politics on the issue. He even requested that the media make gun control more popular.
“I would ask news organizations — because I won’t put these facts forward — have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks over the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side-by-side on their news reports. It won’t be information coming from me, it’ll be coming from you,” the President said, pointing to reporters in the room.
Published in Guns
Guys, this is a political question. Of course it is. Just like abortion—is Fiorina “politicizing” dead babies? How else are we going to arrive at a just solution to a problem—and it IS a problem—of mass shootings other than through politics?
Frankly, if anyone seems to be shedding crocodile tears, its those who extend their heartfelt condolences to the families of the dead, and then turn around and argue that these young people should have been responsible for their own defense. If only they had their priorities straight and, before figuring out how to survive in a depressed economy, seeking out re-training opportunities, figuring out how to pay for college and make sure the kids are fed and cared for while attending class and doing homework, not to mention managing all the mundane, quotidian effort of human life, these had elected to purchase a gun, get trained in the basics of armed combat, and practice regularly so that if—not when, since these are rare occurences—a heavily armed lunatic arrives in the middle of their humanities class and starts shooting, they can return fire… seriously?
This is what you’d have to say to the mothers of the dead in Oregon, the mothers of the little kids in Newtown? That rather than take some reasonable steps to keep firearms out of the hands of crazy people, all of us—interested or otherwise, competent or otherwise—must become gunmen ourselves?
I agree that it would be unrealistic to expect everyone to arm themselves and become proficient in the use of arms, when the odds of ever needing it are so extremely low. But if someone is already a legal permit-holder and carries every else, should they not also be allowed to carry while on campus? It’s not going to stop all massacres but it might end some of them more quickly. And clearly, designating someplace as a gun-free zone does not stop the murderers from murdering.
I wish there were a surefire way of knowing who the people are who have murder in their hearts, so that they could be disarmed. But psychiatrists can’t even tell you which of their patients are and are not going to commit violence.
Kate, even with the most intrusive of governments that attempt to track and stifle each person’s movement in the name of preventing crime, if you neglect the part of the equation that includes the “what if this still fails?” you end up with the same result as we have just seen in Oregon, like in Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, and the whole rest of the world for all of recorded history. I have seen no suggestions that everyone must be required to arm themselves should the criminals we know exist decide to intrude on our own life; however, we ask that we simply be permitted to decide for ourselves to mitigate our own risks without threat of jail, fines, or expulsion from public places.
Why it is that adults can supposedly be reasonably trusted to drive 3000 lb complicated machines to go to and fro at a young age even under the normal stresses, but are apparently too immature to operate a tool that requires little more coordination to use than eating a steak with a knife (a sharp knife at that!) and a fork is not something that I can comprehend.
Please provide these reasonable steps. Bear in mind that this same idea was tossed off here in VA recently when the reporters were killed on air, and every single suggestion provided on how to prevent more shootings would have done absolutely nothing to prevent the shooter from getting a gun. If someone does not have a history of mental illness there is no way to prevent them from purchasing a weapon unless you want to move to a totalitarian state where mandatory, forced mental health checks must be performed frequently to ensure no lunatics can purchase guns or that someone who already has guns hasn’t gone insane.
Of course we should do what we can, but we should not do something just to do something, as in, “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.”
Mass shootings are like plane crashes. A plane crash kills a large number of people, but more people were killed driving to the airport that day and every day. The sensationalism of a mass shooting creates a natural inclination for knee-jerk reactions.
We should use politics to solve all these possible causes of death, but let’s address them in order of likelihood. We have 9 causes to solve first before we need to bother with gun violence, according to this list from http://www.medhelp.org/general-health/articles/The-25-Most-Common-Causes-of-Death/193
In this case there’s a good example of the army veteran who charged at the shooter – he is someone who is already trained and well-practiced in handling a weapon. If he had been carrying a handgun that day, things would probably have ended very differently.
While I fully agree with your comment, let’s not create regrets by saying “if he would have been carrying a gun” — the man already has enough to worry about. I think it’s better to point to the past cases of actual thwarted shootings, and then to the future, namely “if someone were to carry a gun”.
Agreed.
But there should have been security guards nearby who were armed. Goodness, we protect our banks. Why not our schools?
The solution may be more obvious–albeit expensive–than we realize. I’ve noticed that these shooters are targeting places that do not have armed guards. They are not so deranged that they are walking into the local police stations or banks. Perhaps they are more easily deterred than we are imagining.
Tylenol had one incident–and I believe it was a hoax–of a poisoned medicine bottle, and from then on, every medicine company had to spend untold billions of dollars on tamper-free packaging. Baby aspirin poisoning used to occur relatively frequently, and consequently every company making medicines had to spend untold billions of dollars on child-proof caps. One little candy bar was poisoned in some way–again, it may have been hoax–and the Halloween candy-selling companies had to invest billions in packaging that was sealed rather than folded for individual pieces.
Maybe we just have to make up our minds to this new reality. Everyone who opens their doors to the public has to provide armed security.
We could use some advice from the Israelis on this score. They have confronted attackers of all sorts for decades, and they have a lot of experience.
A shallow thinker of Obama’s ilk does not bother to consider how an evil maniac with a notion to commit mass murder would respond to an effective ban on guns. He would be unlikely to simply say “forget it.”
Instead, he might use, as his weapon of choice, a knife, machete, poison, automobile, baseball bat, hammer, crossbow, blackjack, sword, or axe.
The left will argue that the maniac would not be able to kill as many in as short a time as he can with a gun. True, but at the same time, no citizen will have a gun to fight back, and the citizens are less likely to have any other kind of weapon to protect themselves if guns are not generally available.
How many buildings are there on a typical college campus? How many doors per building? It’s not feasible to have them all guarded. Do you know how many businesses would close if the law forced them to hire armed guards? And the surviving ones would have to increase their prices to pay for the guards.
The new reality is that when something like this happens, it is instantly broadcast nationwide and people feel like they are less safe than in the past, even though they are less likely to die by violence than their ancestors were.
Schools are big, right. Agreed.
So perhaps we need, in addition to nearby-armed security, other measures such as tasers in the hands of teachers and teachers’ aides, and maybe tranquilizer or stun guns–nonlethal weapons that teachers would hesitate to use. Also alarms that can be activated by something teachers wear and can grab.
I think we have to get creative and realistic and protect ourselves by many different and redundant systems.
As I think back over the years to the various threats that communities have had to deal with, they have always responded. They need to respond to this threat now too. And I’m sure they will.
When my kids were in elementary school, there was a great fear of kidnapping. The schools implemented all kinds of security measures to prevent it.
Hospitals have to deal with the threat of killer germs they can’t even see. :)
Cooke is being disingenuous, but he is hinting at something important.
Obama would never be so foolish as to recommend repealing the Second Amendment – foolish not because it would decapitate his party, but because there is a much easier way to accomplish the repeal.
The easy way, perfected by progressives 60 years ago, is simply to gain a majority on the Supreme Court.
How was the precedent of Plessy v Ferguson overturned? How did abortion become legal in all 50 states and same-sex marriage, too?
Only “conservatives” advocate amending the Constitution as a solution to political and cultural issues – as we recently heard concerning so-called birthright citizenship – while simultaneously admitting it will be impossible.
Obama is ordering the elite propaganda effort that will lead to 5 people re-interpreting the Second Amendmend…sooner than you think.
Maybe it is a political question to reasonable people who would be willing to talk, negotiate, and compromise. But Obama has no intention of compromising, He never has, he never will. It is his way or the highway. He even unleashed his attack dogs in his pathetic speech – calling on the MSM to do his dirty work for him.
And remember his “if they bring a knife, we bring a gun” comment, or his commentary on immigration that he just can’t make up laws but then went ahead and did it anyway – that is politics to him. When he accepted his honorary doctorate at UND in 2009 he talked about abortion common ground (there is no such thing – you are either for killing babies or against it) and conscience protection. What a joke. This is all just yammering to this man.
When has he ever compromised? He is a hard-core Franklin Marshal Davis/Saul Alinsky progressive and has no intention of settling this politically as you think of it.
There is no compromising with the gun-banning Bolsheviks. All attempts to “reinterpret” the Second Amendment or take away firearms from law-abiding American citizens must be stopped cold.
I see. Sort of the way Dylan Root was radicalized by living in the bigot-filled South. Makes sense.
Um. Ibid.
Absolutely nothing prevents an American from doing a mass-killing (check the stats: the “mass” is relative) with a knife, either. Or a chainsaw, or a sarin bomb. So we’ve got:
knives
gas
chainsaws
law furniture
ball-point pens
AND guns
not OR guns, people. AND.
Actually, we do know. The weapons were acquired legally. Same with many, and probably most of the mass shooters, not to mention un-mass (less than 4 victims_ shooters.
Sure, they could all have gone berserk (mental health is a big feature of this) and attacked people with kitchen knives. That happens. Or hockey sticks. Or baseball bats. Why not make that the choice? “You want to go berserk, and kill Christians, or black bible-studiers, or kindergarteners or whomever the voices in your head are telling you is both the spawn of satan and a conveniently soft target, you have to use a baseball bat to do it because we aren’t going to permit you to buy a firearm?”
Speaking personally, as a 1) Christian and 2.) Bible Studier (albeit white) not to mention 3.)mother, give me with the nut with a bat. And no, it does not impress me when some beer-guzzling yahoo in the next table over at Applebees declares that he is armed and ready to defend me and mine against all comers (this happened.) I still want to defend my own…against a bat.
love,
Kate
By the way—though I realize I am taking up more than my fair share of this thread, but there has to be at least one person here on Ricochet who questions the “more guns” logic, right? —what would your perfect president say, when hauled out for the 18th time to respond to yet another mass shooting of innocent people?
Come on. You can do it: write him/her a speech. Imagine Rubio, Walker, Trump (!??) or our articulate champion of the right to life Mrs. Carly Fiorina in the aftermath of Newtown… how would she sensibly, rationally, pro-second-ammendment-y address the nation after twenty little kids have been shot?
I’d start by questioning the priorities of people who spend more time throwing a tantrum about guns than being outraged that our society has so little value for life that we continue to have people willing to commit mass murder for fame or ideological reasons. It is hard not to get the impression the gun control crowd wouldn’t be anywhere near as upset if they had been killed some other way that didn’t lend itself to their political agenda of controlling people’s personal lives.
Murder is already illegal. Why is passing yet another law going to make a difference when killers don’t obey the existing one? It is knee-jerk emotionalism to demand we do something without identifying that the real problem is not guns but the spiritual sickness of a society that has such low regard for human life.
The calls to do something ring hollow when they continue to recommend changes that would not have prevented the most recent killing. We continue to refuse to address how the mentally ill are handled in this country, and the gun control crowd refuses to recognize the practical limitations of what can actually be accomplished with the ubiquity of guns already in society. Unless we are moving to a totalitarian state, it is simply not going to happen.
Amen.
Hey! At least you gave it a shot—I appreciate that! (Unless Whiskey’s offering, and Mike’s “Amen” were also intended as sample presidential speeches?)
But your version assumes that some stricter version of gun control has already been tried, and hasn’t worked What should the Perfect Prez say right now?
I find it interesting that you imagine failure not as “the crazies were still able to get guns,” but because—unable to acquire guns—they turned to other weapons.
Two arguments: First, I’d much rather be faced with a nutcase in, say, my church on a Sunday (soft target—all liberals, no guns, no guts and mostly elderly) armed with a knife than a gun, and for reasons that I am sure I don’t have to articulate, given that I haven’t heard of many here on Ricochet who spend their Saturdays practicing knife fighting, or baseball-bat-combat. (How many First-Person-Knifer video games are there?)
Second, I’d argue that, as has been demonstrated when it comes to suicide, making it more difficult to kill (whether oneself or others) does actually diminish killing. You don’t have to make it impossible in order to drive the overall mortality down. You just have to make it a little harder.
For example, they found that raising the rail heights on bridges by a mere two or three inches reduced the number of jumpers. And no, the jumpers do not simply go throw themselves under a bus. It sounds illogical, but suicide (like homicide, I would guess?) is not a logical thing—a suicide (and probably a homicide?) gets a fixed idea in his or her head about what he’s doing, how he will do it, and what it means. They have a script they are acting out. Suicide prevention is often a matter of “knocking them off-script” at least long enough to get them some more concrete help.
It wouldn’t surprise me if mass-murder prevention turns out to work the same way. I know it’s much more gratifying to stride about the living room muttering “…out of my cold, dead hands…” but what if we thought about this in terms of making mass murder with guns just a little bit harder? Without relying on uncommon valor and even more uncommon personnel—e.g. highly-trained, motivated and courageous community-college students—or magically changing Society (that’s a liberal thing—we’re supposed to be realists, here) couldn’t we think of ways to make mass murder just a tad harder?
But maybe the actual trade-off is either:
The gun control crowd has yet to ever come up with ways that would actually have prevented the murders they are responding to, so no, maybe we can’t both from an ideological and from a practical standpoint. Why are we obsessing over the how (the gun) and not focusing on the why? Address the why, and there is no how to worry about.
Ackhsully, it seems logical to me. Assuming that your goal is to kill yourself (and not questioning the logic of that goal) then there is much to be said for picking a method that is particularly likely to accomplish the deed, rather than leaving you still alive, perhaps severely maimed and with a quality of life much worse than before, but not actually dead.
Guns and jumps from a great height are pretty good at assuring actual deadness. Pills, on the other hand, are notoriously unreliable (unless, I have heard, you really know what you’re doing). Jumping in front of a bus could be pretty risky – what if the bus swerves and misses? Then you’d get to enjoy the dubious pleasure of being “processed” through the mental-health system as an attempted suicide without having accomplished your real goal, death.
The Complete Manual of Suicide rates methods for efficacy, lack of mess, cost of failure, etc… Maybe it figures it’s from Japan.
But the guns involved in this shooting, and in Charleston and Newtown were legally acquired. In other words, the ubiquity of guns is a direct result of the legality of guns. Since I don’t want to take away all your guns—though I don’t know you personally, I am willing to bet that you are among the people whom I would feel reasonably sure takes guns seriously as dangerous objects, and thus takes steps to be trained and practiced in (as well as entertained by) their use.
Another Ricochetti once commented that the best argument for gun control was the other people he’d seen down at the range on a Saturday morning. This, to me, was a sadly rare example of what the pro-gun crowd refuses to recognize; that the world is not composed primarily of intelligent, thoughtful, disciplined gun-owners, but sloppy, silly and occasionally inebriated fantasists who buy a gun the way they do everything— on impulse. And they too often use it (or allow a mentally-ill relative to use it) on impulse, too.
Anti-gun people agree that ours is a country that thinks too little of life— so little, in fact, that we consider it worth risking the lives of many in order to safeguard the right of a shrinking sub-set of Americans to indulge in what amounts to—at best—a hobby. Let’s face it; those of you who have guns have them because you like them. You find them interesting, compelling, entertaining and even beautiful. You justify it with remarks about home defense and making sure the next King George doesn’t attempt to billet Redcoats in your domicile, but also you just plain think they’re cool. Yes?
That’s okay. Despite the best efforts of the guys I work with to sell me on the charm of firearms, I still find them loud, scary and less exciting than knitting needles. You heard me—knitting needles. Who am I to deride another’s fascinations?
I work with game wardens. I understand guns as necessary tools of certain trades. I approve of hunting. I don’t want to take away all the guns—truly.
But there really isn’t anything quite like a gun when it comes to efficient mass murder. If it were just as easy (and maybe cool?) to kill people with baseball bats, the crazies would buy baseball bats. (Even in America, a bat is cheaper than a gun, and they’re in the next aisle over at Wal-Mart).
Heck, if I were crazy enough, I could kill with my knitting needles…and yet they let my knitting needles onto a plane.
Guns-qua-guns are a problem. Not the only problem…but still.