On Sunday, President Obama attended the memorial gathering for the Navy Yard mass shooting to comfort the families of those who lost loved ones, but also to urge the nation to reexamine gun control and gun rights.
“We cannot accept this,” Obama said of the Sept. 16 attack that killed a dozen people at the Navy Yard. “As Americans bound in grief and love, we must insist here today there’s nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they work.”
The president also said that he senses a “creeping resignation” that homicidal lunacy in the nation, like the Navy Yard massacre and the mass shooting in Chicago last week, are somehow becoming the “new normal.”
But he said “it ought to be a shock to us all” and should spur Americans to demand “a common sense” balance between gun rights and gun control.
“By now . . . it should be clear that the change we need will not come from Washington, even when tragedy strikes Washington,” he said at Sunday’s service on the barracks parade grounds. “Change will come the only way it ever has come, and that’s from the American people.”
Listen to the full remarks, above.
SOURCE: Washington Post | VIDEO SOURCE: YouTube
