Former President Bill Clinton on Sunday blamed the recent unrest in Baltimore on people owning too many guns in this city, combined with a lack of trust in the local police department.
Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mr. Clinton first suggested that development opportunities and more jobs could be the solution in Baltimore. He cited the Baltimore-based athletic clothing company Under Armour as keeping 17,000 jobs in the city.
“I’d go get that guy from Under Armour and I would bring all these leaders and all these kids and I’d figure out what to do and come up with a strategy. You don’t have to solve it all overnight, you just have to make it better than it was,” he said.
“The Baltimore thing came on the heels of what happened in Ferguson, what happened in New York City and all these other places. And there is a big national movement about whether the lives of young African-American men count,” Mr. Clinton said, referring to the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
“You can’t have people walking around with guns. I used to tell people when we did Bosnia, Kosovo, anything like that: You get enough people with weapons around, and there will be unintended consequences. People make mistakes. People do wrong. Things happen,” he continued.
“To hold a community together, you’ve got to have a high level of community trust. Somebody that’s in your family gets shot, you want an answer from somebody you know, and you want to be able to ask questions and get them answered and resolve that. So I think that in addition to economics, we need to look at the places in America where these things happen and they don’t drive people into the streets because they actually trust the process in resolving them. There’s such a trust deficit in America today,” Mr. Clinton said.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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