Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Sunday said that President Obama made himself a “great divider” of Americans by pushing for more gun-control laws in response to last week’s mass shooting at an Oregon community college.
“He’s a great divider and, you know, you have a big issue between the Second Amendment folks and the non-Second Amendment folks, and he is a non-Second Amendment person,” Mr. Trump said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Mr. Obama vowed to continue to promote tougher firearm laws and urged Americans to make electing gun-control proponents a priority after a gunman killed nine people Thursday at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.
Mr. Trump insisted that the rash of mass shootings in America is a mental health issue and not a gun rights issue.
“The gun laws have nothing to do with this. This isn’t guns,” said Mr. Trump. “This is really about mental illness, and I feel very strongly about it.”
He called the push for stricter gun laws mere “political correctness.”
Mr. Trump pointed to Chicago, which is Mr. Obama’s hometown and has one of the highest rates of gun violence in the country, as an example of the ineffectiveness of gun-control laws.
“Look at Chicago. It’s got the toughest gun laws in the United States. You look at other places that have gun laws that are very tough, they do, generally speaking, worse than anybody else,” the real estate mogul said.
Despite Mr. Trump’s advocacy for addressing mental illness, he said that some sick people who want to do harm to others will always “slip through the cracks.”
“You have to show great vigilance. you have to show great vigilance and watch and be careful and security and everything else, but no matter what you do you will have problems and that is the way the world goes,” he said. “You have sick people in this country and throughout the world and you are always going to have difficulty.”
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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