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Courtesy of MSNBC:
“Now’s the time to turn heartbreak into something real,” Obama said at the White House Thursday—more than 100 days after the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown left 26 people dead.
Without mentioning the National Rifle Association specifically, Obama criticized the “powerful voices on the other side” for banking on “running out the clock” on the memory of the tragic shooting and “drowning out the majority of the American people to prevent any of these reforms from happening at all.”
“Their assumption is that people will just forget about it,” he said, while pointing out that the family members with him on stage had not forgotten. ”The people here, they don’t forget. Grace’s dad’s not forgetting. Hadiya’s mom’s not forgotten,” he said, a reference to the parents of 7-year-old Grace McDonnell, who lost her life in the Newtown shooting, and teenager Hadiya Pendleton, who was shot in a Chicago park shortly after performing at the president’s second inauguration.
“The notion that two months or three months after something as horrific as what happened in Newtown happens, and we’ve moved on to other things? That’s not who we are,” Obama said. ”I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.”
I watched this speech this morning and it was incredibly powerful. If you have not seen it I urge you to take the time to do so, and when you do listen for the silence in the room as the audience absorbs what the President is saying. There were times when you could literally heard a pin drop.
Today was also the day that we learned more troubling information about Adam Lanza:
Court documents say the gunman who killed 27 people — including 20 young children — in an attack at a Connecticut elementary school, owned several guns in addition to the ones used in the attack.
Search warrants previously sealed from the public showed Thursday the gunman also owned hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Authorities found a holiday card in the gunman's home with a check made out to him from his mother for the purchase of a firearm. They also found papers from the National Rifle Association in the home.
"Hundreds of rounds of ammunition." I cannot even imagine what kind of person feels that is acceptable or reasonable.
They also found papers from the National Rifle Association in the home. Oh right, what was I thinking?
The President is correct, the NRA, and their supporters, are betting on the short memory of the American people to work in their favor, and that soon people will have stopped caring as much about the shooting and will move on to new concerns leaving nothing done to protect our citizens from the next Adam Lanza, James Holmes, or Jared Loughner.
Well I don't know about all of you, but I am not moving on anywhere. And I certainly have not forgotten.
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