When Obama Again Claims Mass
Shootings Don’t Happen in Other
Nations, One Tweet Wins the Internet
At his press conference in Paris addressing climate change and the threat from ISIS, President Obama made a claim about the armed attack at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs that left three dead and nine other people injured.
“I say this every time we have one of these mass shootings. This just doesn’t happen in other countries,” President Obama said.
A tweet by Washington Examiner writer Beckett Adams captured the irony of the claim.
The provocative tweet launched a fierce debate.
Unfortunately, it is just not the case that mass shootings don’t happen in other nations. In November, Parisians found this sad fact out to their shock and horror when ISIS terrorists launched a series of armed attacks in November that led to over 130 innocent civilians killed.
In January, armed Islamic extremists entered the building of the magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 people and injured 11 others in retaliation for satirical cartoons.
In addition to other mass shootings carried out by Islamic extremists in France alone, other nations deal with mass shootings; when corrected for population size, these are countries with comparable frequencies of mass shooting attacks.
As widely reported in the national media, the President pushed gun control after the Colorado Springs shooting, as he had after other mass shootings.
A recent Marist-McClatchy poll finds that more Americans fear gun violence than terrorism, while Republicans narrowly fear terrorism more: 50-45 percent.
In October, the FBI released its 2014 report on firearms homicides, which shows an 18% decline since 2007. Meanwhile, a recent CBS poll shows that only 23 percent of Americans believe the President has a clear plan for combating ISIS.
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