Washington Post
Obama: America ‘can’t accept this’
By Brigid Schulte and Paul Duggan
Monday September 23, 2013

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama again promised to push for “common sense” gun laws yesterday evening as he stood before a somber and mournful crowd, this time gathered at the Marine Barracks, struggling to make sense of what he called “yet another” mass shooting. Obama called for an end to the violence, an end to the political stalemate over the nation’s gun laws and an end to the resignation that these eruptions of violence are simply “the new normal.”

Fort Hood. Tucson. Aurora. Sandy Hook. Obama intoned the names of places that have been forever changed by mass shootings during his tenure as president. And now, on the macabre list is the Washington Navy Yard, where Aaron Alexis, a former Navy reservist with a history of mental instability and violent and erratic behavior, killed 12 people last week.

“Once more, our hearts are broken. Once more, we ask why,” Obama told a crowd of about 4,000 filling the bleachers at the Barracks, about four blocks from the Navy Yard’s

Building 197, the site of the rampage last Monday. “Once more, we seek strength and wisdom through God’s grace.”

It was an ordinary Monday that became a day of extraordinary horror, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, one of several speakers, said at the memorial service. Vice Adm. William Hilarides, head of Naval Sea Systems Command, his voice breaking, said the 12 victims — engineers and architects and people who helped build and maintain the Navy’s ships — were “killed in the line of duty.”

Obama, as he had on Saturday night before the Congressional Black Caucus, made a determined call for change to the nation’s gun laws. The United States, he said, has more homicides and more violent crime than any other developed nation on Earth.

“These families have endured a tragedy,” Obama said, telling stories of each of the 12 so that they would not be mere statistics of violence but full lives whose sudden loss will be deeply felt. He told stories of the victims handing out dictionaries to third-graders, teaching Sunday school and leaving India to live the American dream.

“It ought to be a shock to all of us as a nation and a people,” Obama said. “It ought to obsess us. It ought to lead us to some sort of transformation.”

Obama spoke of the United Kingdom and Australia, where mass shootings brought about changes to gun laws and have made such “carnage” a rarity.

The violence is not inevitable and Americans are not inherently more violent than people in other countries, he said.

“What’s different is that in America, it’s easy to get your hands on a gun,” Obama said…

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