US President Donald Trump condemned white supremacy and racism and sought greater focus on mental health issues, violent video games and denying arms to people deemed safety risks in his first public remarks on the recent shootings, but made no mention of gun-control measures he had suggested hours earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thirty people died in back-to-back shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio over the past weekend. While the motive of the second shooter, Connor Betts, whose nine victims included his own sister, remains unclear, Patrick Crusius, the El Paso killer, left an online manifesto in which he had railed against Hispanic \u201cinvasion\u201d and \u201cracial mixing\u201d. The number people he killed, which included several Mexican nationals, before giving himself up, went up to 21 Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of the words the shooter used in the note were also deployed frequently by Trump to garner support and funds for a wall along the border with Mexico. He took no responsibility for it in the remarks, and also for the ethnic and racial divisions he has fanned and exploited to rally his base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,\u201d Trump said in an address from the White House, with Vice-President Mike Pence by his side. \u201cHatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump skipped altogether universal background check for gun purchases, which he had teased in a morning tweet and suggested \u201cmarrying\u201d it with immigration reform, which had swiftly denounced by critics as dead-on-arrival, given the complex nature of the two issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The president said instead that he has directed the justice department to propose a legislation prescribing the death penalty for hate crimes and mass-murders. He also sought greater focus on \u201cgruesome and grisly video games\u201d and \u201ca culture that celebrates violence\u201d and on mental health issues, which have long been advocated by the gun-lobby and Republicans are alternatives to tougher gun laws. \u201cMental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Donald Trump condemned white supremacy and racism and sought greater focus on mental health issues, violent video games and denying arms to people deemed safety risks in his first public remarks on the recent shootings, but made no mention of gun-control measures he had suggested hours earlier. Thirty people died in back-to-back shootings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":67663,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67664,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67662\/revisions\/67664"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}