President Obama memorialized the victims of the Washington Navy Yard shooting on Sunday by insisting tragedies like this “ought to lead to some sort of transformation.”
“Let me quickly give you one of the highlights for the President this weekend,” Glenn said on radio this morning. “[He was talking about how] we need to have a national obsession on guns and a transformation of America on gun control.”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: These families have endured a shattering tragedy. It ought to be a shock to all of us, as a nation and as a people. It ought to obsess us. It ought to lead to some sort of transformation.
“I can't believe how overtly they make these points,” Stu said. “It's like what we should do is transform our country because of the emotional reaction to a terrible incident.”
“It's chilling,” Pat added.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: That's what happened in other countries when they experienced similar tragedies. In the United Kingdom, in Australia, just a single mass shooting occurred in those countries, and they understood there was nothing ordinary about this kind of carnage. They endured great heartbreak, but they also mobilized and they changed. And mass shootings became a great rarity.
“Stop just a second,” Glenn said. “So it didn't abolish them. It became a great rarity. He is so halted in this. He knows that all of this is a lie. First of all, I'm warning you, why is he doing this… What happens when we go to war? Well, I'll tell you what happens when we go to war: We start having shootings like this, done by Muslim extremists, done by leftists. And what happens? The president says, ‘We are clamping down. We're getting these guns off the street because everybody else that has any kind of common sense has already done it, and ya know that's the answer. And I'm just gonna take the steps to do it to protect the American people because we're at war.’ And that is where he is headed. That's what he's setting up.”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: And yet here in the United States after the round of clock coverage on cable news, after the heartbreaking interviews with families, after all the speeches and all the punditry and all the commentary, nothing happens. We must insist here today there is nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they work.
“Jeffy, will you admit there's nothing normal about being gunned down at work? We have to admit this,” Glenn said. “Pat, will you admit that there's nothing normal about being gunned down at work? Stu, would you agree that there's nothing normal? I mean how ridiculous is this? It's not normal. We know it. There are certain trends that happen and we can look at those.”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: There's nothing normal about our children being gunned down in their classrooms. There's nothing normal about children dying in our streets from stray bullets. No other advanced nation endures this kind of violence. None. Here in America the murder rate is three times what it is in other developed nations. The murder rate with guns is ten times what it is in other developed nations. It comes about because of decisions we make or fail to make. I've said before we cannot stop every act of senseless violence.
“I mean, there's so many issues with that. First of all, he's defining "advanced" – the only countries he's counting as advanced are the ones that do better than us in these statistics,” Stu said. “And secondly there's plenty of countries, hundreds of countries that do worse, over a hundred countries that do worse, but he's just counting none of those as advanced… The other part of that is when he says ‘this type of violence.’ Well, I mean, I don't know what that means. What do you mean ‘this kind of violence?’”
“We cover all of this in the book Control,” Glenn said. “We can't even know the evil that lurks in his heart. We can't even figure that one out. With all the stuff that's going on and all the transformation talk, we can't even figure out the evil that lurks in that man's heart. How are we going to figure it out from everybody else?”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: But if we can prevent even one tragedy like this ‑‑
“One, if we can prevent even one,” Pat said. “Isn't it worth it to throw the Constitution into the fire?”
Watch the remarks in their entirety below:
Front page image courtesy of the AP