On July 9 Obama criticized Texas open carry laws, contending that police safety rests on gun control.
Obama spoke from Warsaw, Poland, where he is attending a meeting of NATO leaders.
Fox News carried Obama’s speech, in which he referenced “mass shootings” and Chicago gun crime, then tied them to the Dallas police ambush and said:
[Police] have a really difficult time in communities where they know guns are everywhere. And as I said before, they have right to come home and now they have very little margin of error in terms of making decisions. So if you care about the safety of our police officers, then you can’t set aside the gun issue and pretend that that’s irrelevant.
He then turned to Texas open carry laws and suggested these laws make it even harder for police to do their job. He said:
At the protest in Dallas, one of the challenges for the Dallas police department–as they’re being shot at–is, because this is an open carry state there are a bunch of people participating in the protest who have weapons on them. Imagine if you’re a police officer and you’re trying to sort how who is shooting at you and there are bunch of people who’ve got guns on them.
Obama then transitioned to the officer-involved shooting death of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. “There was a gun in the car, apparently was licensed” but the presence of the gun “caused, in some fashion, those tragic events.”
He then summed these things up, positing the presence of guns as a cause of tensions “between police and the communities where they serve.” Obama said we have to have a “talk” about guns, and he believes “there is a way to talk…that is consistent with our constitution and the Second Amendment.”
Obama then pledged that he will not stop talking about gun control.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.