WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama on Sunday memorialized the victims of the Washington Navy Yard shooting by urging Americans not to give up on a transformation in gun laws that he argued are to blame for an epidemic of violence. “There is nothing inevitable about it - it comes about because of decisions we make or fail to make,” Obama said.
Obama issued a call to action on gun-control measures that failed to pass earlier this year and show no new momentum in the wake of last week’s rampage at a military installation just blocks from the Capitol.
“Our tears are not enough,” Obama told thousands gathered to mourn at the Marine Barracks. “Our words and our prayers are not enough. If we really want to honor these 12 men and women, if we really want to be a country where we can go to work and go to school and walk our streets free from senseless violence without so many lives being stolen by a bullet from a gun, then we’re going to have to change.”
Obama said when such senseless deaths strike in the U.S., “it ought to be a shock to all of us; it ought to obsess us. It ought to lead to some sort of transformation.”
But, Obama said, “nothing happens. Alongside the anguish of these American families, alongside the accumulated outrage so many of us feel, sometimes I fear there is a creeping resignation that these tragedies are just somehow the way it is, that this is somehow the new normal.We cannot accept this. As Americans bound in grief and love, we must insist here today there is nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they work.”
Obama spoke of the United Kingdom and Australia, where he said mass shootings produced changes to gun laws and have made such carnage a rarity.
The violence in America - some groups have counted 20 mass shootings since Obama was elected - is not inevitable, the president said. Americans are not inherently more violent than other people in other countries, he said.
“What’s different in America is it’s easy to get your hands on a gun,” he said. He acknowledged “the politics are difficult,” a lesson he learned after failing to get expanded background checks for gun buyers through the Democratic-controlled Senate this spring. Obama had proposed the measure after the shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School killed 20 first-graders and six staff members in December.
“And that’s sometimes where the resignation comes from: the sense that our politics are frozen and that nothing will change. Well, I cannot accept that,” Obama said. “By now, though, it should be clear that the change we need will not come from Washington, even when tragedy strikes Washington. Change will come the only way it ever has come, and that’s from the American people.”
Obama joined military leaders including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, in eulogizing the dozen victims killed in last Monday’s shooting, speaking from the parade grounds at the Marine Barracks, a site personally selected by Thomas Jefferson because of its close marching distance to the Navy Yard.
The invitation-only crowd included about 4,000 mourners, with the victims’ family members directly in front of the speakers’ stage. The president and first lady Michelle Obama met privately with the families before the service, White House officials said.
The rampage was carried out, authorities say, by shotgun-wielding Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old former Navy reservist and information-technology contractor who struggled with mental illness. Police killed Alexis in a gunbattle.
Alexis had a history of violent outbursts, had told police he was hearing voices and was in the early stages of being treated by the Veterans Administration for serious mental problems.
Obama said it’s clear from the Navy Yard shooting that the country needs to better secure its military facilities and to improve mental-health services, but also needs to address gun laws.
“I do not accept that we cannot find a common-sense way to preserve our traditions, including our basic Second Amendment freedoms and the rights of law-abiding gun owners, while at the same time reducing the gun violence that unleashes so much mayhem on a regular basis,” Obama said.
“It may not happen tomorrow and it may not happen this week; it may not happen next month. But it will happen because it is the change that we need. And it’s a change overwhelmingly supported by the majority of Americans.”
Earlier Sunday, National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre rejected any call for gun control. “The problem is there weren’t enough good guys with guns,” LaPierre said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
He also said greater efforts were needed to identify and lock up dangerous mentally ill people.
The nation’s mental-health system is “in complete breakdown,” resulting in not enough of the mentally ill being committed to psychiatric hospitals, LaPierre said.
“If we leave these homicidal maniacs on the street … they’re going to kill,” he said.
Doctors who treated Alexis should have carried out “a complete mental-health status exam,” Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., told CBS’ Face the Nation.
“We have to make it where the health-care professionals in this country, when they see somebody that is having symptoms of psychosis or schizophrenia, that they can act on that by notifying the do-not-sell list so that people can’t buy guns,” he said. “He [Alexis] bought a gun in spite of the fact that at several interchanges people were aware of his psychosis.”
At the same time, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the co-author of a bill to expand background checks to more gun purchasers, acknowledged the bill remains stalled in the Senate.
He told CBS he has no intention of renewing his effort to pass the measure in light of the Navy Yard shootings unless he sees movement on the part of the opponents of the bill.
“I’m not going to go out there and just beat the drum for the sake of beating the drum,” he said.
“There has to be people willing to move off the position they’ve taken, and they’ve got to come to that conclusion themselves.”
It was an ordinary Monday that became a day of extraordinary horror, Mabus 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.”
Speaking before the president at the memorial, Washington Mayor Vincent Gray said the country is “drowning in a sea of guns.”
“This time, it happened within the view of our Capitol dome,” Gray said. “And I, for one, will not be silent about the fact that the time has come for action.”
The service ended with a bugler playing taps and the singing of the Navy hymn after a reading of the names of the fallen, who ranged in age from 46 to 73 and included civilian employees and contractors. Eight people were also hurt, including a police officer and two others who suffered gunshot wounds.
Obama also mentioned each victim - describing them in turn for their love of their families, their service to their community and their passions, including classic cars and the Washington Capitals hockey team.
“Once more our hearts are broken. Once more we ask, why?” Obama said.
Information for this article was contributed by Nedra Pickler, Philip Elliott, Jessica Gresko, Stacy A. Anderson and Joan Lowy of The Associated Press; and by Brigid Schulte and Paul Duggan of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/23/2013