Before you believe the spin of the press, or even watch a news clip or even Youtube video that has been highly edited, here are the actual words of President Barack Obama during the Hofstra debate on October 16, 2012. I have painstakingly, and I MEAN painstakingly, transcribed the Presidents words for your reading displeasure. At first, I tried to include punctuation but gave up after some time because it was just too hard to discern sentence structure during his ramblings. My apologies if I confused “a” with “uh” since Mr. Obama pronounces them the same.
The question posed to the President was, “..in 2008, you stated you wanted to keep AK-47’s out of the hands of criminals. What has your administration done or plan to do to limit the availability of assault weapons?”
President Obama:
“We’re a nation that believes in the Second Amendment and I believe in the Second Amendment. You know, we’ve got a long tradition of hunting and sportsmen and people who want to make sure they can protect themselves but there have been too many instances during the course of my presidency where I have had to comfort families who’ve lost somebody, most recently in Aurora. You know, just uh, a couple of uh weeks ago actually probably about a month, uh, I saw uh, a mother who I had met at the bedside of her son who had been shot in that theatre and her son had been shot in the head and we spent some time and we said a prayer and remarkably about two months later this young man and his mom showed up! And he looked unbelievable, good as new. But there were a lot of families who didn’t have that good fortune and whose sons or daughters or husbands didn’t survive so my belief is that A, we have to enforce the laws that we’ve already got, make sure that we’re keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and those who are mentally ill. We’ve done a much better job in terms of background checks but we’ve got more to do when it comes to enforcement but I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theatres don’t belong on our streets and so what I’m trying to do is get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally, part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced but part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence because frankly in my home town of Chicago there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47’s. They’re using cheap handguns and so what can we do to intervene to make sure that young people have opportunity that our schools are working that if there’s violence on the streets that working with faith groups and law enforcement we can catch it before it gets out of control so what I want is uh, is a comprehensive strategy part of it is seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill but part of it is also going deeper and seeing if we can get into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur.”
Time and space do not allow me to completely dissect these remarks. My head hurts and my blood pressure is up after just transcribing them! Therefore, look for my commentary in an upcoming column. Suffice it to say that Obama will take every opportunity available to further restrict your Second Amendment rights if given another term when he can be more “flexible.”
Image: courtesy of Clarea15; Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
