Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said President Donald Trump only points out the rising shootings and murders in her city to use as a “political punching bag.”
Mitchell said, “I want to also ask you about the violence this past weekend in Chicago, at least 60 shootings. The president jumped all over this, comparing it to — saying the city is worse than Afghanistan. your reaction as you’re trying to come to grips with all of this?”
Lightfoot said, “Well, look, if you go back over many years, President Trump has said a lot of disparaging things about the city of Chicago. He likes to use us as a political punching bag. But if the president was really committed to helping us deal with our violence, he would do some easy things. One is, he would push for universal background checks. He would push for an assault weapons ban. He would push to make sure that people who were banned from getting on airplanes can’t get guns. This is the kind of thing that federal leadership can do.”
“But as long as we are challenged with having states surrounding us, notably Indiana, that has very lax gun laws, where somebody can drive across the border and literally load up a vehicle with military-grade weapons and bring them back to the city of Chicago, we’re going to continue to be challenged,” she continued. “We’re doing an all-hands-on-deck strategy. We’re really focusing on the root causes of the violence. But fundamentally we have too many illegal guns on our street, and that is a direct result of a failure of federal leadership, which is why we need change in November. And we need the kind of leadership that Joe Biden is going to bring to our country.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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