REACTIONS:
GOP struggles to respond in wake of shootings, Mulvaney says to not put blame on Trump.
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Sunday defended President Donald Trump after mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, calling the shooters “sick people” and disputing that either shooting was linked to politics.
“This is not appropriate. This is way beyond the pale. These are sick people,” Mulvaney said on ABC News’ “This Week.”
Other Republicans, including Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, blamed the shooting on video games and social media.
Their comments came as Democrats argued that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants and people of color has fueled the type of hatred on display in a manifesto that investigators believe was posted online by the El Paso shooting suspect, which listed angry rants about a “Hispanic invasion.”
Trump “doesn’t just tolerate — he encourages the type of open racism” and violence that follows, former congressman Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who is running for president, said on “This Week” from his hometown of El Paso.
Mulvaney suggested Sunday that the White House is willing to reopen the debate on gun control in the wake of the shootings. “If we can agree on one thing as a nation ... it is that crazy people like this should not have been able to get guns,” he said.
But he was defiant in pushing back against critics who argue that Trump has played a role in inciting hatred, noting that the writer of the manifesto made clear that his views about Latino immigrants predate Trump.
“If you actually go and look at it, what the guy says is he’s felt this way a long time before Donald Trump got elected president,” Mulvaney said.
Other Republicans on the Sunday morning news shows made little mention of Trump. On Fox News Channel, Patrick called the El Paso shooting “evil” and referenced a part of the manifesto in which the writer mentioned the video game “Call of Duty.”
“We’ve always had guns. We’ve always had evil. But what’s changed where we see this rash of shooting? And I see a video game industry that teaches young people to kill,” Patrick said.
He also blamed the internet message board 8chan and other social media platforms where he said “bullying” is allowed to take place every day “and we turn our head and we allow it.”
“We have to take a long look at who we are as a nation and where we want to go and what we’re going to tolerate from social media and from video games,” Patrick said.
McCarthy also blamed video games, which he argued have given potential assailants a model for how to carry out mass shootings.
“The idea of these video games — to dehumanize individuals, to have a game of shooting individuals and others — I’ve always felt that is a problem for future generations,” McCarthy said on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”