There have been many mass shootings in the United States since President Obama moved into the White House in 2009. Unfortunately, the places where the shootings took place and the names of those slain are getting harder to remember. However, President Obama made note of the spike when he spoke the day after nine people were gunned down at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.
“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times,” he said. One of those communities is Birmingham, New York where Jiverly Voong killed 13 people on April 3, 2015. Another is Fort Hood, Texas where Nidal Hasan killed 13 on November 5, 2009. There’s also Tucson, Arizona, where on January 8, 2011 Jared Loughner killed six people, including a nine-year-old child. And more children were slain in Newtown, Connecticut where Adam Lanza killed 27 people, including his mother and 20 elementary school children.
And though African-American communities don’t usually experience mass murders like the one that occurred in Charleston, one only needs to look back to Memorial Day weekend, when 12 people were killed in Chicago, with dozens more injured in shootings, and nine killed in Baltimore, with 20 others shot.
During post-shooting debates, we hear common rhetoric about gun control: “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” But it would be very difficult to imagine that there would be more murders and mass killings if there were less guns, legal and illegal, in the possession of civilians.
President Obama used his speech after the Charleston murders to discuss gun violence. “We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” he said.
President Obama then made a statement that should make each and every American feel a little disheartened and embarrassed: “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it.”
We may be an advanced country, but that doesn’t stop bigoted people from killing innocent citizens, like when James Holmes walked into a movie theater and killed 12 people in Aurora, Colorado. President Obama used the Charleston murders to address gun violence in this country, and we, as a country, need to stand up and say enough is enough to prevent more innocent children and adults from randomly losing their lives.
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