I’m a gun owner.
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Though other presidential candidates from both parties quickly expressed their condolences on Twitter, Clinton was the first candidate to suggest action on gun violence.
“I believe we are smart enough, compassionate enough to balance Second Amendment rights” with gun control, she said, adding there are too many “needless, senseless deaths”. “Do we know that he has a criminal background, that he would not be allowed to carry a gun?” I go through background checks.
Democrats have become increasingly willing to speak out about gun violence immediately following shootings.
WDBJ reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, were shot around 6:45 a.m. during a broadcast from Smith Mountain Lake in the community of Moneta.
“This is why I’ve long advocated for background checks”, he continued, reports Mediaite.
On a national level, President Barack Obama has said that gun control is the area where he’s been the most frustrated with a lack of progress during his time in the White House.
Democratic candidate Martin O’Malley made no mention of gun control in his tweeted response to the videotaped executions of the two innocent victims.
That image was part of an intense search that followed for a suspect police identified as 41-year-old Vester Lee Flanagan II of Roanoke, who appeared on air at the TV station WDBJ in Virginia as Bryce Williams. The videos were removed shortly afterward. “Gov. McAuliffe seemed confident the suspect will be in custody soon, saying authorities had a picture of him, that they’ve ID’d him”, reported CNN’s Brian Todd.
He was hired at the station in the spring of 2012 after working at stations in San Francisco and in Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Georgia. He also said a supervisor at the station called black people lazy.
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WDBJ described the two dead journalists as an ambitious reporter-and-cameraman team who often produced light and breezy feature stories for the morning program. A university spokesman said he graduated in 1995 with a degree in radio and television.
