Monday, Donald Trump gave his first formal address regarding the mass shootings that happened over the weekend in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. It was an address that could be seen seen as extremely typical for both Trump and your typical run of the mill politician.
Trump condemned white supremacy and racism — which is a given and shouldn’t be treated as some bonus acknowledgement by the POTUS — stating:
“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.”
Yeah, that’s great and all, however, in typical Trump fashion he failed to take on any of the blame himself. This especially after the El Paso Shooter used some of the same divisive and racist rhetoric in his manifesto the President has used in the past to justify the mass killing he (the shooter) carried out on Saturday. Nor did Trump try and walk back the tweet he sent out Monday morning when he tried to pass the blame of the weekend’s massacres to the media.
📝 Trump’s “plan” to combat mass shootings in the United States
Within his address, Trump laid out four different points which he plans to use as a blueprint (I guess) to combat the violence that ravaged the Country over the weekend.
Those four different points are:
- Directing the Department of Justice to work more closely with local, state and federal agencies — as well as work by social media companies to detect potential mass shooters.
- Ending “the glorification of violence in our society,” specifically citing violent video games.
- Reforming mental health laws.
- Passing “red flag” laws to prevent those judged to be a danger to society from obtaining guns.
Trump didn’t further elaborate on his proposal this morning where he tried to see if he could tie background check legislation to immigration reform. He also didn’t
Trump also didn’t acknowledge the Bipartisan Background Checks Act sitting in the House since February and that is currently being essentially blocked by Mitch McConnell in the Senate.
💬 Politicians going to Politic
In fairness to Donald Trump, he wouldn’t be the first politician — or POTUS for that matter — to layout some stale, recycled proposals sprinkled with some partisanship that’ll get some play play here in the coming days, and perhaps weeks but will eventually fall by the waste side.
Once again blaming video games? We’ve seen this same bullshit before when the Columbine shooters referenced Doom in their writings but I fail to see the El Paso shooter reference Red Dead Redemption in his manifesto. Sure Trump and politicians have a point when it comes to bringing up the violence within American society however if that’s a road politicians want to go down, lets take a look at the growing glorification of the military industrial complex in the United States.
As far as mental health goes… Okay do something about it.
The problems in the United States are so systematic it sickening. I plan to get more into that in a later post that’ll go up either today or tomorrow but in the meantime those same systematic problems were here before Trump and they’ll be here after Trump.
