Monday, September 23, 2013
Associated Press
WASHINGTON
President Barack Obama on Sunday memorialized the victims of the Washington Navy Yard shooting by urging Americans not to give up on a transformation in gun laws that he argued are to blame for an epidemic of violence. “There is nothing inevitable about it — it comes about because of decisions we make or fail to make,” Obama said.
Reprising his role of the nation’s consoler in chief after yet another mass shooting, Obama issued a call to action on gun-control measures that failed to pass earlier this year and show no new momentum in the wake of last week’s rampage at a military installation just blocks from the Capitol.
“Our tears are not enough,” Obama told thousands gathered to mourn at the Marine Barracks. “Our words and our prayers are not enough. If we really want to honor these 12 men and women, if we really want to be a country where we can go to work and go to school and walk our streets free from senseless violence without so many lives being stolen by a bullet from a gun, then we’re going to have to change.”
Obama said when such senseless deaths strike in America, “it ought to be a shock to all of us, it ought to obsess us.”
But, Obama said, “nothing happens. Alongside the anguish of these American families, alongside the accumulated outrage so many of us feel, sometimes I fear there is a creeping resignation that these tragedies are just somehow the way it is, that this is somehow the new normal. We cannot accept this. As Americans bound in grief and love, we must insist here today there is nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they work.”
Obama joined military leaders in eulogizing the dozen victims killed in last Monday’s shooting.
Authorities say their loved ones’ lives were taken by shotgun-wielding Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old former Navy reservist and information technology contractor who had mental illness. Police killed Alexis in a gunbattle.