President Obama on Monday challenged opponents of limiting access to semi-automatic weapons to meet the families of the victims, after he met with them himself in Orlando.
“Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families,” he said after laying a bouquet of white flowers at a makeshift memorial at the Philips Center, adjacent to Orlando’s city hall.
Speaking with Vice President Joe Biden at his side, Obama said the city was “shaken by an evil, hateful act,” but today “most of all, there is love.”
The families’ grief is “beyond description,” and he said he and Biden told them, “Our hearts are broken, too. We stand with you.”
“Once again, as has been true too many times before, I held and hugged grieving family members and friends and they asked why does this keep happening?” he said. “They pleaded that we do more to stop” such killings.
The president said the U.S. will continue to be “relentless” against terrorist groups and will destroy the Islamic State, but the country needs to address gun violence too.
“It’s going to take more than our military,” he said.
“Our politics have conspired to make it as easy as possible for a terrorist … to buy extraordinary powerful weapons and they can do so legally,” he added.
Those who were killed or injured at the Pulse gay night club early Sunday were “gunned down by a single killer with a powerful assault weapon,” he said.
“The motives of this killer may have been different than the mass killers in Aurora, or Newtown. But the instruments of death were so similar. Now another 49 innocent people are dead. Another 53 are injured. Some are still fighting for their lives.”
“We can’t anticipate or catch every single deranged person…,” he said. “But we can do something about the amount of damage that they do.”
The notion that it would have been better if more people in the nightclub were similarly armed to the killer, he said, “defies common sense.”
Gun rights advocates, he said, should explain “why it is they think our liberty requires these repeated tragedies. That’s not the meaning of liberty.”
Earlier, he said he hugged and held grieving parents.
“They don’t care about politics. Neither do I,” he said. “This debate needs to change.”
“I truly hope that senators rise to the moment and do the right thing,” he added. “We can stop some tragedies. We can save some lives. If we don’t act, we will keep seeing more massacres like this.”
“It’s a good time for us to reflect on how we treat each other,” he concluded. “We have to end discrimination and violence against our brothers and sisters in the LGBT community.”
