Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry meant to say “incident” Friday when he referred to a racially motivated terrorist attack this week in Charleston, S.C., as an “accident,” his spokeswoman told the Washington Examiner.
“From the context of his comments, it is clear Gov. Perry meant incident,” said the newly announced 2016 Republican presidential candidate’s spokeswoman, Lucy Nashed.
Perry’s apparent flub was made during an interview with Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg.
Obama’s remarks this week on the mass shooting in Charleston, which claimed the lives of nine African-Americans, served as an opportunity for the president to mark a tragedy, Perry said. But he said the commander in chief’s address also gave him the chance to push his a gun control agenda.
The president’s response to the shooting, Perry said, is a good an example of “the knee-jerk reaction of saying if we can just take all the guns away, this won’t happen.”
“This is the [modus operandi] of this administration,” Perry said, “Anytime there is an accident like this, the president is clear: He doesn’t like for Americans to have guns, and so he uses every opportunity, this being another one, to basically go parrot that message.”
Nashed maintained in a comment to the Examiner that the former Texas governor meant “incident.”
The day after an alleged terrorist, Dylann Storm Roof, 21, shot and killed nine parishioners during a prayer meeting at Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Obama addressed the nation.
“I have had to make statements like this too many times,” he said. “Communities have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. We don’t have all of the facts, but 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.”
The president added that Americans “have to reckon with the fact that this mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it.”
“At some point, it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it,” Obama continued. “And for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.”
