Seldom do I agree with President Obama, but I think he was exactly on point with his comment:
But unfortunately, South Carolina is a state where gun culture rides rampant. The news has come out that Dylann Roof's father actually gave him a gun as a 21st birthday present. And this seems to be the norm in South Carolina. I remember many years ago we had a neighbor, a woman who had grown up in South Carolina. And she gave a BB gun as a present to her then-nine-year-old son! (This was nearly 20 years ago; that son is now an Army military policeman, but at nine he hardly could be trusted with a gun, even a BB gun!) At one point, my wife was babysitting at that neighbor's apartment, and she was afraid he might put a BB in his younger brother's eye. She took the gun from him and put it up on a shelf too high for the boy to reach.
But in South Carolina, it seems that giving BB guns to 9-year-olds and real honest-to-God guns to 21-year-olds for birthday presents is a normal thing. And in states like that, there will be enough votes that we can never repeal the unfortunate Second Amendment, the worst blemish in our generally-admirable Constitution. So we need to find ways of getting around that amendment. I just wish I knew how.
We do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this kind of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn't happen in other places with this kind of frequency. It is in our power to do something about it.
But unfortunately, South Carolina is a state where gun culture rides rampant. The news has come out that Dylann Roof's father actually gave him a gun as a 21st birthday present. And this seems to be the norm in South Carolina. I remember many years ago we had a neighbor, a woman who had grown up in South Carolina. And she gave a BB gun as a present to her then-nine-year-old son! (This was nearly 20 years ago; that son is now an Army military policeman, but at nine he hardly could be trusted with a gun, even a BB gun!) At one point, my wife was babysitting at that neighbor's apartment, and she was afraid he might put a BB in his younger brother's eye. She took the gun from him and put it up on a shelf too high for the boy to reach.
But in South Carolina, it seems that giving BB guns to 9-year-olds and real honest-to-God guns to 21-year-olds for birthday presents is a normal thing. And in states like that, there will be enough votes that we can never repeal the unfortunate Second Amendment, the worst blemish in our generally-admirable Constitution. So we need to find ways of getting around that amendment. I just wish I knew how.
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