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Subscribe to RSSPresident Obama and the first lady will speak at a memorial service in Tucson tomorrow for the victims of the shooting, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie reported.
The Washington Post: “Now the question becomes, when Obama next addresses the nation, what he will say… Obama is likely to deliver a speech about tolerance, a theme that could also be featured in his State of the Union address on Jan. 25. However, with liberals and conservatives assuming their assigned battle stations over whether gun laws and partisan rhetoric are to blame, the White House is undecided about the exact message the president will send.”
NPR notes, “In the past, presidents have been able to unify the country during moments like these. But in today's hyperpartisan political climate, even those potentially unifying moments can be hard to pull off.”
The New York Daily News looks at the difference between President Obama and NYC Mayor Bloomberg on how they talk about guns.
The gun debate: “In the wake of the attempted assassination of a member of Congress, politicians on both sides of the aisle are passionately debating the role of incendiary rhetoric,” Politico writes. “Very few of them are talking about guns… The fact that the shooting does not appear to be prompting an episode of hand-wringing is exactly the way the gun lobby likes it. That the gun issue has been so secondary, and the approach to the gun component of the incident so tentative, indicates the extent to which the issue has subsided in the past decade. A bipartisan truce is in effect on gun control issues in Washington -- a truce on the National Rifle Association’s terms.”
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson: “We may not be sure that the bloodbath in Tucson had anything to do with politics, but we know it had everything to do with our nation's insane refusal to impose reasonable controls on guns.”
“Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik introduced the issue strongly during a press conference,” NPR notes. ‘I have never been a proponent of letting everybody in this state carry weapons under any circumstances that they want and that's almost where we are,’ he said.”
Vice President Biden was in Afghanistan yesterday; so was Mitt Romney.
And another tragedy: “An energy lobbyist, the wife of an aide to President Obama, died yesterday in a fiery car crash in the garage of her Washington home,” Bloomberg News writes, adding, “A police statement said the vehicle crashed in the interior of the garage, igniting a fire that engulfed the car and the garage… The Washington Police Department’s major crash investigations unit is probing the accident.
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In my opinion, President Obama should hand his Nobel Prize over to Sheriff Clarence Dupnik right now. The Sheriff has made the most sense of anyone talking about this shooting since Saturday.
The sheriff of Pima County was voted into office to enforce the laws. If he wants to provide political commentary, he should resign and go work for MSNBC.
yeah, we wouldn't want elected officials making sensible observations based on years of training and experience, now would we?
So what would these opportunistic politicians be trying to exploit about this tragedy if he had used a bomb, as people do all over the world when they can't easily use guns, or had simply driven a vehicle through the crowd at high speed? Both of these tactics are used frequently around the world to affect the same type of mayhem, and the results speak for themselves: the death toll would likely have been just as high, if not higher had he chosen such alternatives. But because he used a gun instead, which was no easier for him to do, suddenly the method is to blame, rather than people like the sheriff, whose responsibility it was to deal with and report this person all the many times he had run-ins with the law, and indications of mental instability, well before he ever got a gun. Had they done their jobs properly, he wouldn't have been able to legally purchase it. The problem isn't with the law, it's with people like the sheriff who sabotage it by not doing their part to make it work.