Obama: Gun Control Is Necessary ‘If You Care About the Safety of Our Police Officers’
Leah Barkoukis
TownHall.com
Jul 09, 2016
Speaking from the NATO Summit in Poland on Saturday, President Obama dismissed rhetoric that the nation is sharply divided and back to where it was in the 1960s.
“You’re not seeing riots. You’re not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully. You’ve seen, almost uniformly, peaceful protests and you’ve seen, uniformly, police handling those protests with professionalism,” Obama said.
“We have to make sure that all of us step back, do some reflection and make sure that the rhetoric we engage in is constructive and not destructive. That we’re not painting anybody with an overly broad brush and we’re not constantly thinking the worst in other people rather than the best.”
The president said it’s been a “tough” week in America, after two black men were killed by police in Minnesota and Louisiana, and five law enforcement officers were murdered and six others injured by a sniper at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas.
While taking questions, the president also responded to those who criticized him for mentioning gun control during his first statement on the Dallas attack.
“Now with the respect to the issue guns,” he said before audibly sighing. “I am going to keep on talking about the fact that we cannot eliminate all racial tension in our country overnight. We are not going to be able to identify ahead of time and eliminate every madman or troubled individual who might want to do harm against innocent people, but we can make it harder for them to do so.”
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