President Obama was sitting down for several interviews with local television news stations yesterday, moments after news broke about a shooting of two local journalists in Roanoke, Virginia. When asked about his reaction to the shooting, Obama called for more gun control in America.
“Sadly, gun violence is in the environment in this country every single day,” he said in an interview with local New Orleans station WWL-TV. “And some of this violence can’t be prevented but a whole lot of it can if we are doing a better job of making sure that people who have problems, people who shouldn’t have guns, don’t have them.”
Obama added that he continued to hope for a grassroots movement in favor of more gun control to move more restrictive policies forward.
“It breaks my heart every time you read or hear about these kids of incidents,” Obama said in an interview with WPVI-TV in Philadelphia.
He pointed out again that more people died from gun violence in America than terrorism, and that Americans should take it seriously.
“What we know is that the number of people who die from gun-related incidents around this country dwarfs any deaths that happen through terrorism,” he explained.
Obama also offered praise for local journalists in an interview with KIRO 7 news in Seattle.
“It’s a testimony in this case to the fact that local journalists they go into some tough places,” he said, although he noted the shooting site in Roanoke “wasn’t one of those situations.”
“This is a place that they should have been safe,” he added. “And I think it’s one more argument of why we need to look at how we can reduce gun violence in this country.”
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