Trump: School shootings ‘unique’ to US
GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump said on Friday that school shootings are an isolated phenomenon, occurring for the most part only in America.
“We have millions of sick people all over the world,” he told hosts Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” But he added, “This is sort of unique to our country — the school shootings.”
Trump’s remarks follow Thursday’s mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., which left 10 dead including the shooter.
{mosads}Trump argued Friday that only so many safety precautions exist for preventing future incidents like the one in Oregon.
“We’ll probably find out that like the others, ‘gee whiz, he was a loner and sick like all the others,’ ” he said of alleged gunman Chris Harper Mercer.
“You’re always going to have problems,” he said of violence. “That’s the way the world works. For the next million years, people will slip through the cracks.”
The 26-year-old Mercer died after exchanging fire with police officers at the school.
Last month, Trump released a policy paper defending the Second Amendment and gun rights. In it he argued that America needs greater law enforcement against violent crime, better mental healthcare and better protections for legal gun ownership.
Trump has repeatedly argued that undiagnosed mental illness and social indifference drives violence more than gun ownership.
President Obama argued late Wednesday that shootings like the one in Oregon earlier that afternoon deserve to be “politicized.”
The visibly angry commander in chief sharply criticized Congress for its inaction on gun control during a press conference that evening.
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