President Barack Obama is calling for a national conversation on the “gun violence epidemic” and urging Americans to stand together and protect themselves.
The president spoke with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday morning and laid out his case for new gun control laws, saying the country needs to put the guns away and to focus on preventing gun violence.
The nation faces an “epidemic” of gun violence, he said.
And it is a crisis that we need to confront.
The NRA has said Obama is wrong on guns and wrong on gun violence but the president has been unable to persuade the gun lobby to change its position.
The American people have said that we can’t accept the NRA’s position on guns, the president said Tuesday morning.
And that’s why we’ve been talking about new gun legislation and new legislation.
The White House has repeatedly insisted the president is wrong about guns.
But the president’s comments to Cooper on Monday and Tuesday are the first time the president called for new restrictions on guns.
And on Tuesday, the White House released a new report that found a sharp decline in gun-related deaths in the United States over the past two decades.
The administration has repeatedly maintained that the rate of gun deaths is declining and that the number of Americans who have been killed by guns in the U.S. is dropping, a claim the NRA rejects.
“This administration has been wrong and the president will continue to be wrong,” NRA spokesman Dan Cox said Tuesday.
“And what we’ve seen is an explosion of the Second Amendment right, but the American people don’t like it, and they won’t accept it.”
President Obama says new gun laws would help prevent gun violenceThe president said the country has to confront the “epidemics” of guns and the “crisis” of the gun violence epidemic.
The president said he would call for more stringent gun control measures if he is reelected in November, but he said he will take a more moderate approach if he loses.
The latest report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found the number one cause of death for black Americans was gun violence and the top cause of deaths for Hispanic Americans was suicide.
More than 2,500 Americans died from gun violence in 2015, the report found.
It also found that nearly 30,000 people were killed by gun violence last year.