Mr. Obama, speaking in France, where he was taking part in international talks on climate change, said, “I will continue to present those things that I can do administratively, but in the end of the day, Congress, states, local governments are going to have to act in order to make sure that we’re preventing people who are deranged or have violent tendencies from getting weapons that can magnify the damage that they do.”
He noted that such assaults, and gun killings in general, were far more common in the United States than in other developed countries. “We devote enormous resources, and properly so,” to fighting terrorism, he said, “and yet, in the United States, we have the power to do more to prevent what is just a regular process of gun homicides that is unequaled by multiples of five, six, 10.”
“I say this every time we have one of these mass shootings. This just doesn’t happen in other countries,” he said during a press conference in Paris today.
The only problem with his answer was that he was standing in Paris, where a mass shooting conducted by Islamic State terrorists had just taken place, killing over 100 people.
