Donald Trump has promised to accomplish several things if he succeeds in becoming president, but the Republican hopeful says he wouldn’t be able to stop mass shootings like the one that occurred Thursday at a community college in Oregon.
The GOP front-runner weighed in on the tragic rampage that left ten people dead and several others injured yesterday afternoon, telling MSNBC “these things happen and it’s a horrible thing to behold.”
“You’re always going to have problems,” Trump said during the appearance on “Morning Joe.”
He added, “We have millions and millions of people and millions of sick people all over the world. It can happen all over the world; it does happen all over the world … [but] this is sort of unique to this country, the school shootings.”
Trump noted that Oregon currently has “strong laws on the books,” but questioned how to deal with the “loners” and “sick people” who, he says, are usually the types of people to commit such violent acts.
“What are you going to do, institutionalize everybody?” he said.
“Often times this happens and the neighbors say, ‘We saw that about him and it looks like he could be a problem,'” Trump continued. “But it’s awfully hard to put somebody in an institution for the rest of their lives based on the fact he looks like he could be a problem.”
Asked by one pundit whether he viewed such shootings as unavoidable because some people “are just going to slip through the cracks,” Trump responded: “It’s not politically correct to say that, but you’re going to have difficulty and that will be for the next million years, there’s going to be difficulty and people are going to slip through the cracks.”
The New York businessman released a position paper on the Second Amendment in mid-September, saying the right to keep and bear arms is “imperative” to protect. Though his paper never suggests institutionalizing individuals, Trump does call for additional efforts to protect the public from violent, mentally ill individuals.
“All of the tragic mass murders that occurred in the past several years have something in common — there were red flags that were ignored,” he wrote in the document.
“[F]or those who are violent, a danger to themselves or others, we need to get them off the street before they can terrorize our communities. This is just common sense,” he adds.
