US President Donald Trump on Monday told a nation mourning the death of 31 people in two-weekend mass shootings that he rejected racism and white supremacist ideology, moving to blunt criticism that his anti-immigrant rhetoric fuels violence.
As flags flew at half-mast at the White House and across the country and the death toll edged up by two, Trump made an unusually direct condemnation of racists as he took on the role of consoler in chief.
But as the country tried to digest weekend shootings that left 22 dead at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas and another nine outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio, Trump offered little in the way of new ideas for a country awash with guns and painfully accustomed to mass shootings.
Trump hails arrest in Pakistan of alleged Mumbai attacks mastermind
“Our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” Trump said.
He stressed that mental illness was the main culprit fueling mass shootings in America, as opposed to the ready availability of firearms or extremist thinking, as argued by gun control advocates.
At the sites of America’s latest massacres — numbers 250 and 251 so far this year — people came to honor the dead.
Source: Guardian Newspaper.
