Obama: This is not the 1960s

President Obama Saturday rejected suggestions that the nation is greatly divided, saying the United States is fundamentally more unified than during the riots of the 1960s.

“Americans of all races and all backgrounds are rightly outraged by the inexcusable attacks on police, whether it’s in Dallas or any place else,” Obama said at the opening of a press conference during the NATO Summit in Warsaw, Poland. “That includes protesters, it includes family members who have grave concerns about police conduct — and they’ve said that this is unacceptable. There’s no division there.”

Obama refrained in his opening remarks from making any direct policy recommendations, such as on gun control or other issues. Instead, he emphasized the underlying unity of Americans, despite the racially-charged violence. And he asserted that the Dallas shooter is not representative of African-Americans.

“We cannot let the actions of a few define all of us,” Obama said. “The demented individual who carried out those attacks in Dallas, he’s no more representative of African-Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans or the shooters in Orlando or San Bernardino were representative of Muslim Americans. They don’t speak for us; that’s not who we are.”

But he stood by earlier his calls for tighter gun laws when a reporter raised the issue during a follow-up question.

“I am going to keep on talking about the fact that we cannot eliminate all racial tension in our country overnight, we are not going to be able to identify ahead of time and eliminate every madman or troubled individual who might want to do harm against innocent people — but we can make it harder for them to do so,” Obama said.

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