During the nationally televised town hall on gun violence on CNN, President Obama called out the NRA for not showing up and revealed that the Obama White House has repeatedly invited the NRA to the White House, but they have declined to show up.
The President said:
By the way, there’s a reason that the NRA is not here. They’re just down the street, and since this is the main reason that they exist you’d think that they’d be prepared to have a debate with the President.
(Cooper: They haven’t been to the White House in years.)
…..
We’ve invited them. We have invited them repeatedly, but if you listen to the rhetoric, it is so over the top and so heated. And most importantly is not acknowledging the fact that there’s no other consumer item that we purchase…There’s nothing else in our lives that we purchase that we don’t try to make a little safer if we can.
Traffic fatalities have gone down drastically during my lifetime. And part of it is technology, and part of it is that the National Highway Safety Transportation Administration does research, and they figure out. You know, seat belts really work then we pass some laws to make sure seat belts are fastened. Airbags make a lot of sense. Let’s try those out. Toys. We say you know what? We find out that kids are swallowing toys all of the time, let’s make sure that the toys aren’t so small that they swallow them if they’re for toddlers or infants. Medicine. Kids can’t open aspirin caps.
Now the notion that we would not apply the same basic principles to gun ownership that we do to everything else that we own just to try to make them safer or the notion that anything we do to try to make them safer is somehow a plot to take away guns. That contradicts what we try to make a better life for Americans in every other area of our lives.
Anderson Cooper asked President Obama if he would welcome a meeting with the NRA. The President answered, “I’ve said this repeatedly. I’m happy to meet with them. I’m happy to talk to them, but the conversation has to be based on facts and truth, and what we’re actually proposing. Not some imaginary fiction in which Obama’s trying to take away your guns.”
Obama pointed out that the reason why gun sales spike after mass shootings is that the NRA has convinced many of its members that somebody is going to come and grab your guns. He added that this idea was very profitable for the gun manufacturers.
President Obama just leveled the NRA with facts and truth.
Just like the Republican Party, the NRA does not want to work with the President on fact-based solutions. The NRA would rather obstruct and fear monger. Obama’s condition that the NRA come to the table and deal in facts will never happen, because the facts aren’t profitable. The NRA has been selling a paranoid gun confiscation fantasy to its members for years, so Obama just dropped a dose of reality on the fact deniers.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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