Watch Obama’s Fiercest Speech Yet on Gun Violence
Calling America’s epidemic of gun violence “a political choice we make” and declaring of the nation’s political class, “we, collectively, are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction,” President Obama delivered one of the rawest speeches of his presidency Thursday in response to the Umpqua Community College shooting rampage.
What follows is a partial transcript of the president’s remarks, in which he rebuked the intransigence of the NRA and called for new laws to end America’s exceptional bloodshed.
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There’s been another mass shooting in America, this time in a community college in Oregon. That means there are more American families — moms, dads, children whose lives have been changed forever. That means there’s another community stunned with grief. And communities across the country forced to relive their own anguish, and parents across the country who are scared because they know it might have been their families or their children…
We are not the only country with people with mental illnesses who 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…
Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine… we’ve become numb to this. We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson, after Newtown, after Aurora after Charleston. It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict this kind of harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun…
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