Obama has said he will cut short his foreign trip and visit Dallas next week after a black extremist opened fire on officers protecting a peaceful march against police brutality. “America is not as divided as some have suggested”.
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President Barack Obama on Saturday rejected the notion that this week’s stunning violence is a signal that the USA has returned to some of the darkest days of its past, saying that as painful as the killings of police and black men were, “America is not as divided as some have suggested”.
The shooter who … was interested in black-power groups and had black-nationalist stuff all over his Facebook page and who told cops during the standoff that he was upset at white people and wanted to kill some white cops as revenge for police shootings of black suspects?
Describing Dallas shooting suspect Micah Xavier Johnson as a “demented individual”, Obama said he “is no more representative of African Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans, or the shooter in Orlando or San Bernardino were representative of Muslim Americans”.
“If you care about the safety of our police officers, then you can’t set aside the gun issue and pretend that that’s irrelevant”, he said.
The attack in Dallas also wounded seven other officers and two civilians.
“What will never change, is the unwavering commitment of the United States to the security and defense of Europe”, Obama said. In Chicago, she says, there needs to be better tracking of police conduct, better training and what she calls a “process of reconciliation”. “That’s the spirit that I want to build on”.
But Obama, who has angered his political opponents after every deadly mass shooting by calling for tighter gun laws, made clear that he will continue to speak out about the need for such measures, which the Republican-controlled Congress has refused to go along with.
But the divisive issue of gun control could not be separated from the tension between police and local citizens, he said. He also cited the presence of an apparently legally owned gun in the vehicle where motorist Philando Castile was shot dead during a traffic stop in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota. “But we can make it harder for them to do so”.
“In Minneapolis, we don’t know yet what happened, but we do know that there was a gun in the vehicle that apparently was licensed, but it caused, in some fashion, those tragic events”, Obama told reporters.
Obama is very unlikely to succeed in reviving major gun control reform before he leaves office in January next year.
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“This has been a tough week”, the president said.
