Democrats attempt to link Trump, gun rampages
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Democratic presidential candidates sought to lay blame Sunday on President Donald Trump after a pair of mass shootings, saying his language about minority groups promotes racial division and violence.
In the span of less than 24 hours, gunmen in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, killed more than two dozen people. Authorities are investigating whether the suspect in the El Paso shooting wrote an anti-immigrant manifesto that was posted online shortly before the attack.
In tweets Saturday and Sunday, Trump condemned the violence and offered condolences to the two cities.
At public events and on television, several Democratic candidates declared a need for more gun restrictions, such as universal background checks. But they directed much of their attention to Trump, who has drawn criticism from Democrats over his immigration policies and his disputes with minority-group lawmakers.
“There is complicity in the president’s hatred that undermines the goodness and the decency of Americans regardless of what party,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “To say nothing in a time of rising hatred, it’s not enough to say that ‘I’m not a hatemonger myself.’ If you are not actively working against hate, calling it out, you are complicit in what is going on.”
South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg said on CNN’s State of the Union that confronting white nationalist terrorism would be embarrassing for a president who “helped stoke many of these feelings in this country to begin with.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., opened a town hall-style meeting in Las Vegas with a moment of silence and by calling for universal background checks for firearms purchases and more restrictions on assault weapons.
He also called out the president.
“I say to President Trump, please stop the racist anti-immigrant rhetoric,” he said. “Stop the hatred in this country, which is creating the kind of violence that we see.”
Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas and an El Paso native, also criticized Trump.
“We’ve got to acknowledge the hatred, the open racism that we’re seeing,” O’Rourke said on State of the Union. “There’s an environment of it in the United States. We see it on Fox News; we see it on the Internet. But we also see it from our commander in chief, and he is encouraging this. He doesn’t just tolerate it, he encourages it.”
Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said the Trump administration was willing to have a “broad-based discussion” about the causes of mass shootings, “but to think that this is just a gun issue … is not right.”
“We’ve had guns in this country for hundreds of years,” he said on ABC’s This Week. “We haven’t had this until recently, and we need to figure out why.”
Mulvaney disputed Democrats’ contention that the suspect in El Paso was influenced by Trump, saying that the manifesto suggested the suspect had been driven by rage since before Trump was elected.
Mulvaney said Trump’s first phone call after hearing of the shooting was to Attorney General William Barr to discuss “what we could do to send a message to the people, the sick people who would do this kind of stuff, that this is not appropriate.”
On Fox News, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called the El Paso shooting “evil,” raised the issue of social media and referenced a part of the manifesto in which the writer mentioned the Call of Duty video game franchise.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California did not directly link the El Paso and Dayton shootings to violent video games, but he suggested that those games can cause young Americans to “dehumanize” others, potentially leading to actual violence.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a series of tweets that lawmakers “need to keep trying” to address gun violence but that “sadly, there are some issues, like homelessness and these shootings, where we simply don’t have all the answers.”