President Obama speaks out:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/us/troutdale-oregon-reynolds-high-school-shooting.html?hpw&rref=us&_r=0
WASHINGTON — President Obama, speaking hours after a gunman killed a student and wounded a teacher at an Oregon high school, said Tuesday that his failure to push through stricter gun laws was the greatest frustration of his presidency, declaring, “We’re the only developed country on earth where this happens.”
Speaking in blunt and bitter terms about a bloody trail of shootings in the last month, Mr. Obama said: “Our levels of gun violence are off the charts. There’s no advanced, developed country on earth that would put up with this.”
While the president said he had undertaken several executive actions to tighten existing regulations, the failure to require a background check for buyers of guns left the nation vulnerable to an unending series of mass shootings. “The bottom line is, is that we don’t have enough tools right now to really make as big of a dent as we need to,” Mr. Obama said to a young audience at a White House question-and-answer session sponsored by the social media site Tumblr.
The string of shootings continued on Tuesday when a gunman at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Ore., killed a 14-year-old student and wounded a physical education teacher. The authorities in Troutdale, a Portland suburb, did not immediately identify the gunman, who was armed with a rifle and later found dead at the scene. It was unclear if he was a student or knew either of the victims.
The student who was killed, Emilio Hoffman, was a freshman at the school. The teacher, Todd Rispler, was wounded in the hip, officials said, but the injury was not serious.
The president’s emotional remarks later in Washington were specifically in response to a question from a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where six students
were killed late last month by Elliot O. Rodger.
“What are you going to do?” the student asked. “What can we all do?”
Mr. Obama replied that passing federal legislation would require a shift in public opinion big enough to move Congress, where he said most members “are terrified of the N.R.A.”
“Until that changes, until there is a fundamental shift in public opinion in which people say: ‘Enough, this is not acceptable, this is not normal, this isn’t, sort of, the price we should be paying for our freedom,’ ” Mr. Obama said, “sadly, not that much is going to change.”
The president expressed little hope for a change in sentiment, noting that even
his push for background checks for would-be gun buyers fell short in the wake of the
2012 schoolhouse slaughter in Newtown, Conn.
“The fact that 20 6-year-olds were gunned down in the most violent fashion possible and this town couldn’t do anything about it was stunning to me,” the president said.