Jeb Bush: Gun control wouldn’t have prevented Charleston
Gun-control measures would not have stopped tragedies, like the mass shooting in South Carolina that left nine dead, from occurring, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Saturday.
“Florida is a pro-gun state. Gun violence has dropped. There’s a reason for it,” the 2016 Republican presidential candidate told reporters after a town hall event in Nevada.
“We created a balance that’s focused on lowering gun violence but protecting the Second Amendment, and it’s a model for many other countries and many other states because of that,” he added, according to CNN.
{mosads}Bush said none of the gun-control proposals backed by President Obama and others would have prevented the massacres that have taken place across the country.
“Every one of them. There’s not been a single thing that he’s proposed recently that would have changed the course of any of these tragic cases,” Bush said.
On Friday, the president delivered a powerful call for Americans to confront gun violence during his eulogy of Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of nine victims killed in the Charleston, S.C., church shooting.
Dylann Storm Roof, a 21-year old white man, has been charged with the deaths of nine people in the shooting that occurred late Wednesday. He reportedly confessed to officers after his capture and said he wanted to start a race war.
Bush said he didn’t think “we need to be politicizing the issue.”
“I’d also say going forward that these cases — that the race system in Charleston or these cases of people who are just mentally deranged — we as a society better figure out how we identify these folks long before they feel compelled to take up a gun and kill innocent people,” he said.
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