Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.com
Not only did Donald Trump not tweet out messages of condolences for families who lost loved ones five years ago on Thursday at the Sand Hook gun massacre in Connecticut, and not only did White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on that day insist there’s simply nothing that can be done to battle American epidemic of gun violence, but Trump himself managed to insult the Sandy Hook families in another appalling way.
In a craven display of collective indifference, Trump hosted Wayne LaPierre, the controversial head of the NRA, at the White House on Thursday night, as families and friends of the elementary school gun massacre were remembering the victims of the horrific killing spree.
The shooting rampage claimed 26 lives, including 20 young children. In the wake of the attack, LaPierre’s NRA spread lies about the emergency response to the attack, lashed out at critics, and urged that every school in America have armed guards in order to fend off possible gunmen wielding AK-47s.
And soon after that, LaPierre led the fight to obstruct President Barack Obama’s bipartisan effort to pass a wildly popular background check bill.
LaPierre represents everything that’s wrong and immoral with radical, far-right voices of the gun-obsessed GOP culture. And that’s who Trump invited to the White House on the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre.
Gun safety advocate Shannon Watts, who founded the group Moms Demand Action, noted on Twitter the contrast between how Trump and Obama deal with families of Sandy Hook, as well as the memories of the slain:
In each of the past 4 years, President Obama invited gun violence prevention activists, gun violence survivors (including the Sandy Hook families) and supportive lawmakers to his Christmas party. Zero gun lobbyists were in attendance. pic.twitter.com/QePW9FtbSh
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) December 15, 2017
Trump’s do-nothing strategy regarding gun violence was on display on Thursday at the White House, when Sanders was asked by a reporter at the daily briefing to explain “what President Trump has done to try to protect the American people against a similar type” of Sandy Hook massacre. Sanders at first started touting Trump’s tighter border security measures.
After she was reminded that the Sandy Hook shooter didn’t enter the U.S. from another country, nor did the shooters who killed nearly 100 people during the massacres in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, Texas, this year, Sanders conceded that the White House hasn’t done a thing to try to stop the bloodshed, because the White House, echoing NRA spin, doesn’t think there is anything to be done to stop the bloodshed.
The White House now views gun massacres the same way it views the weather: It’s out of their hands. And it views the Sandy Hook victims as inconvenient reminders of the past.
