There has been no calendar week during President Barack Obama’s second term without a mass shooting. The massacre at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, that left 10 dead and seven injured on October 1 was the latest to cause him to make an anguished statement.
Despite making seven similar impromptu trips to the podium in previous years, this time the increasingly uninhibited president expressed a rare and powerful frustration.
“This is something we should politicize,” Obama said. “Our thoughts and prayers are not enough.” That’s a far cry from the hours after the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting, when Jay Carney, White House spokesman at the time, played down any focus on politics, saying, “I don’t think today is that day.”
The above excerpt was originally published in Newsweek.
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