Obama Blames Lack of Gun Control for JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and MLK Assassinations
Former President Obama — who has described his inability to enact strict new gun control measures as his greatest political failure — is blaming the lack of such laws for the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.
“The horror of gun violence continues to plague our nation, a pain that many in this room know too well,” Obama said Wednesday night. “Bullets that took Bobby and JFK and Dr. King are just like the bullets that took Trayvon and those schoolchildren in Newtown, and those police officers in Dallas and those concert-goers in Vegas, those congregants in Thousand Oaks.”
The comments came after the former president received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Award at a gala in New York City.
Obama said that while gun violence continues, he’s encouraged by recent efforts to enact new restrictions.
“Even there through the fog of our grief we see ripples of progress,” he said. “Eight years ago Gabby Giffords and little chance of survival, I remember standing at her hospital bed and it was doubtful that she would ever wake up. Six years ago, this weekend, Newtown families knew unimaginable anguish and grief. And today their vocal leaders within the movement that has wrapped up legislative victories in states all across this country.”
He pointed to a recent congressional election in Georgia as a successful example of fighting the gun rights lobby.
“Six years ago Lucy McBath’s son was shot and killed in the parking lot of a gas station because the kids in the car were playing music too loud apparently and she turned her grief into hope and her hope into a seat in the next Congress running unabashedly against the gun lobby in the great state of Georgia,” he said. “She won.”
During the remarks, Obama also took a veiled dig at his successor, saying that “there are better days ahead” and “the crooked road can be made straight.” [Video]
“Hope is never a willful ignorance to the harshness and cruelties that so many suffer,” he said. “Or the enormous challenges that we face in mounting progress in this imperfect world. And hope is certainly not the smug complacency of those who won life’s lottery and think it’s all because of their intelligence, or charm, or hard work on their own. Rather, hope is the insistence that, no matter how hard our circumstances, there are better days ahead. That the crooked road can be made straight.”
