Obama: Our Children’s Lives Are at Risk Because Guns Became a Partisan Issue

Former President Barack Obama said Tuesday on “CBS Mornings” that the United States was allowing our children’s lives to be at risk because gun ownership has become a partisan issue.

Host Nate Burelson asked, “Gun violence is the number one cause of death for children in this country. What is the radical solution? And do you believe there is a larger issue at hand that causes fractures among us in this country?”

Obama said, “We are unique among advanced, developed nations, in tolerating on a routine basis, gun violence in the form of shootings, mass shootings, suicides. You know in Australia you had one mass shooting, 50 years ago, they said we’re not doing that anymore. That is normally how you would expect a society to respond when your children are at risk.”

Burelson asked, “Why is it so hard for us to do that?”

Obama said, “Well look, somehow, and there are a lot of historical reasons for this, gun ownership in this country became an ideological issue and a partisan issue, in ways that it shouldn’t be. It has become sort of a proxy for arguments about our culture wars. Instead of thinking about it in a very pragmatic way, we end up really arguing about identify and emotion and all kinds of stuff that does not have to do with keeping our children safe. Even in the absence of action at the federal level you are still seeing communities able to reduce violence by dealing with not just access to guns, but just as importantly, making sure that the young people in these communities feel as if they’ve got somebody who’s paying attention to them. We don’t have room for cynicism and we can’t give up.”

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