President Obama reacted to the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting by declaring that enough is enough and that something must be done about the easy access to weapons on our streets.
In a statement, the President said:
The last thing Americans should have to do, over the holidays or any day, is comfort the families of people killed by gun violence — people who woke up in the morning and bid their loved ones goodbye with no idea it would be for the last time.
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And yet, two days after Thanksgiving, that’s what we are forced to do again.
We don’t yet know what this particular gunman’s so-called motive was for shooting twelve people, or for terrorizing an entire community, when he opened fire with an assault weapon and took hostages at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado. What we do know is that he killed a cop in the line of duty, along with two of the citizens that police officer was trying to protect. We know that law enforcement saved lives, as so many of them do every day, all across America. And we know that more Americans and their families had fear forced upon them.
This is not normal. We can’t let it become normal. If we truly care about this — if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience — then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough.
May God bless Officer Garrett Swasey and the Americans he tried to save — and may He grant the rest of us the courage to do the same thing.
The anti-common sense but pro-easy access to guns crowd have already broken out their typical excuses. They use the fact that the shooter, Robert Lewis Dear, was a loner with likely mental health issues to bolster their “one bad apple” excuse.
After each mass shooting the opponents of common sense gun reforms, always claim that the shooter was a lone acting bad apple that doesn’t represent those who support easy access to guns for all.
Their argument ignores the obvious fact that the one bad apple argument is the exact reason guns should not be so easy for anyone to acquire. The extremist anti-common sense reform crowd immediate takes the argument to the extreme. Either everyone has easy access to guns all of the time, or the government wants to take away all of the guns.
What President Obama wants is a middle ground, where is it more difficult for people who should not have easy access to guns to buy them. It’s common sense that mentally unstable should not be able to legally have easy access to guns.
Enough is enough. If the President still wasn’t convinced to take executive action to make it more difficult for terrorists and the mentally ill to buy guns before the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooting, one suspects that he night be now.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
